The Eternal Prince
by TheWorldBelongsToME
Summary: What if Vegeta got his wish on Namek? What would have had to happen to make this possible? What would have happened afterward? Who would defeat Freeza? Would Trunks ever be born? Let's find out. . . ON HIATUS
1. Prologue: The Emperor's Black Throne

Prologue: The Emperor's Black Throne

"Well?" Vegeta snarled. He sat in a throne. It was sleek, ovular, and black, with white rims and three gold prongs erecting into the air. Like Freeza's chair before his, it hovered. It was floating above the end of a carpet that was stretched across the narrow throne room like a frog's tongue. That thin tongue of red was the only color in the otherwise white and black environs.

Even Vegeta, lounging in his throne, wore battle armor white as a doctor's coat. The pointed pauldrons on his shoulders and his breastplate, all in the style of the old armor Freeza's men wore on Namek, were glazed over with an opal sheen that glistened when in the light.

Yet there was no light in this room. The walls towered high, high above like a Gothic cathedral, and hidden in the very top of these walls were windows. Little of the outside light found its way through their intricate lacework; thus the darkness was free to shroud the room with its blinding presence.

Withough the two bowls of fire roaring on both sides of his throne, Vegeta would not have been able to see the face of the pink-skinned alien quaking beneath him.

"I'm afraid, Emperor," the alien stammered with fear for his very life, "the soldiers did not arrive in time."

"What?" Vegeta leapt from his throne.

The red carpet and marble floor cracked beneath his feet as he bored his eyes into the alien, "I purposely directed them to leave at noon— no more, no less! I wasted my breath and my time, lengthening the message, all so that they would arrive exactly when needed. And now you tell me that my words fell on deaf ears, that my words were in vain?"

Vegeta scooped up the bulbous pink alien by his jowls and began to throttle the floundering creature. The creature motioned to Vegeta pleadingly. Vegeta loosened his grip to let the thing speak.

"I-I-they," the alien wheezed, "The men left when you told them to leave. I did not forget to deliver your command. But-but somehow _they_ knew. They must have received warning. No one was there. Not one man, woman, or child. Not even any traces of them."

Vegeta narrowed his eyes and carefully squeezed the creature's neck until the thing squealed for mercy. Again, Vegeta loosened his grip enough for the alien to speak.

"And?" Vegeta said as if there was another question hidden within his own, too horrifying to speak aloud. The alien, though near out of his wits with terror, still understood. He coughed and a small rivulet of green blood leaked out of the corner of his mouth.

Struggling, he managed to reply, "My Emperor, she was gone, as well. They searched and searched but could not find her."

"How unfortunate for you," hissed Vegeta with a face as impassive as a rock. The pink alien burst into tears.

"B-but!" he howled, "I am only a messenger. It is the message that offends, not I!"

"No," Vegeta smirked stiffly, as if he had not done so in a long time, "It is not the message that offends me. It's that damn bloated face of yours. It reminds me of a beast I already slew. I shall delight to slay him again in you, if only to do him credit. Now die."

A blue-white glow formed around Vegeta's hand. Then, it seemed like a miniature earthquake shook the whole room. The alien's head exploded into a thousand parts, plummeting blood in every direction. Vegeta's hand and face were drenched with the viscous green liquid.

"Woman," Vegeta whispered through his hand, wiping away the blood from his face as the alien's body collapsed lifelessly to the floor, "Woman, I swear by the Legendary Super Saiyajin— yes, I swear by myself, I will kill you."

How did it come to this?


	2. Chapter One: Your Wish Has Been

Chapter One: Your Wish Has Been

"Take off those clothes," barked Vegeta. The two Earthlings stood blankly beside him.

"And put on those under suits. Do it fast! Freeza's coming!"

Kuririn and Gohan blinked as Vegeta grabbed two suits from a locker in Freeza's unoccupied ship. Both mumbling, the Earthlings begrudgingly yanked at the outer layers of their clothes. Kuririn doffed his orange uniform and Gohan his blue. All the while, the young half-blood grumbled that wearing armor so similar to that of the mass-murderers working under Freeza would mean the demise of his "image." Kuririn, on the other hand, grumbled on behalf of his perplexity.

So much had happened that day. They were on Namek. Vegeta became an ally, at least temporarily. Ginyu switched bodies with a frog. And Goku— thank the gods that he finally arrived!— got his body back and was now healing in a rejuvenation machine. This was certainly one long, busy day. Most likely, though, that was because it was always day on Namek.

Kuririn gasped at the thought of it: day, always and forever. Then he gasped at the thought of being on a foreign planet, fighting an evil alien tyrant, with the aid of a potential evil alien tyrant. He shook his head vehemently; he had long ago given up on making sense of it all.

"If Vegeta needs our help against Freeza," he spoke while tugging on the blue under suit of the armor, "Freeza must be incredibly strong!"

Gohan nodded and blurted a simple, "I'm scared!"

Vegeta handed the twosome their fighting jackets with the pointed pauldrons. He explained to them further about the material of the armor, crossing his arms and watching indifferently as they ogled at the advanced technology.

"How long will it take Goku to heal?" Kuririn asked once he had adjusted to his armor. Vegeta shrugged and approximated that it would take a little less than an hour. Did they have an hour? Freeza assuredly was headed their way. They needed to summon the Dragon immediately.

"Gohan," Kuririn turned to the boy who was swinging his arms to test the battle suit's endurance, "I'm flying to the Great Elder!" Gohan stopped and looked at his little bald friend with a question in his eyes.

"Freeza might be there, but unless we find out how to activate the Dragon Balls, we're sure to lose," Kuririn explained. This only made Gohan want to go there as well, but Kuririn refused him abruptly and then flew off.

"Now what?" Gohan wondered aloud as he stared at Kuririn's shrinking image as he stood outside of Freeza's ship.

"We wait!" a grating voice snapped Gohan out of his thoughts. Gohan swiftly wheeled around to see Vegeta, his arms still glued in a crossed-position.

"Now the question remains: where will we be waiting?" Vegeta continued, "I will be waiting there," he pointed at a leg of the ship, near the entrance door, "Disturb me needlessly, and you will be taking a trip to the rejuvenation machine right after Kakarrot is done with it."

Gohan rolled his eyes. That was his automatic response to almost everything the Saiyajin Prince said now that he was growing used to the man. He watched as Vegeta settled behind the leg of the ship. He watched as Vegeta fell into a slumber.

Gohan wished he could sleep. He was so tired. But the adrenaline would never let him rest. He felt a need to bounce around and pace and glance up at the sky every five minutes to see if Kuririn was back yet.

"No," he frowned at his edginess. He planted his feet in the ground and forced himself to stay still. To distract himself from his sudden urge to move again, he peered at the sky, diligently this time, and tried to reason with himself.

"It'll take two hours to go to the Great Elder," he told himself, "and come back here. What should we do if Freeza comes before then?"

Then, he felt two ki's tickle his own. Something was coming.

He lifted into the air, flying out a bit and thinking to himself, "It's not Freeza. Is it Kuririn? But there are two of them coming."

Gohan saw Kuririn and Dende approach him in the sky.

"I did it, Gohan!" Kuririn shouted. Gohan excitedly sprinted through the air and halted in front of his friend.

Gohan shouted back, "That was incredibly fast! How did you do it?"

"The Great Elder asked Dende to come!" Kuririn answered through an ear-to-ear smile.

"To teach us how to use the Dragon Balls?" Gohan looked to Dende.

The little green Namek nodded warmly, "Yes!" Gohan looked giddy; he was about to amicably force the Namek to speak further, when Kuririn tossed him a furtive glance.

"So what's happened to Vegeta?" asked Kuririn, his voice souring at the sound of the Prince's name, "We hid our ki's so he wouldn't know we were coming."

Gohan turned his head to look. He saw a slight silhouette behind one of the legs of Freeza's ship. Vegeta was still sound asleep.

"I don't think he's noticed you yet," Gohan replied, growing more eager as he realized the weight of his words, "He hasn't slept in a while, so he's out now!" It was the perfect opportunity, and everyone recognized this.

Bringing a tight fist up into the air, Kuririn frowned determinedly. He hunched over as if he were in a secret conference, leading the others to naturally gather closer to him.

He drew out the plan, "Okay! Follow me! Let's bring the Dragon Balls out here so he won't catch on! Even if he notices after the Dragon appears, that might buy us a little time!"

The three nodded to each other and then flew down to Freeza's ship. Alighting ever so softly on the ground, they crept up to the Dragon Balls. Gohan and Dende both took two and flew off while Kuririn balanced three and quickly joined them. All the while, their faces were in knots with the dread of awaking the slumbering Saiyajin.

Safely away from the ship and from Vegeta, the three all reveled for a moment in their tiny victory. That is, until they felt it. Yes, it. It was an awesome wave of power entwined with darkness. It was a viper twirled around an envenomed rapier. It was death wrapped around death.

Dende, Kuririn, and Gohan all leered to their right in pure, untainted horror.

"Fr-Freeza!" Kuririn yelped. It could be none other but he who armed himself with limitless power in his right hand and eternal sleep in his left. Even then, as the three paused for only a moment in their shock, they were wasting time, for Freeza was erupting through the sky, coming closer and closer to them with each passing breath.

"Hurry, Dende!" Kuririn released himself from his fear, "Have it grant our wish now!" In a blunder, the green boy agreed and immediately sputtered out a strange tongue, his hands hovering over the seven yellow balls.

"_Takaraputo popurunga pupirittoparo_!"

The balls pulsed with light, and the sky went black as if the gods had swept a blanket over the heavens in an instant. Kuririn and Gohan watched on in awe as the green boy let out his last cry, summoning the Dragon.

A streak of lightning shot into the air and out of it formed a green-scaled, yellow-bellied Dragon. Its eyes were red pools reaching out beyond all reckoning of time and eternity. Its shoulders were wide and hunched over. It got progressively smaller the further one looked down its body, until it attenuated into but an ethereal string of light emitted by the Dragon Balls.

"That's huge! It's a lot bigger than the Earth's. A different shape, too!"" Kuririn mused in excitement.

Without removing his gaze from the Dragon, Gohan asked, "Is that Shenron?"

"It's called Porunga here," said Dende, "It means the god of dreams."

And a god imagined only in the wildest of dreams it most certainly was. Kuririn, Dende, and Gohan were but ants before the stooping figure of the Dragon.

"Thou who hast gathered all seven Dragon Spheres, name your wish," a rumbling thunder boomed through the air, "I will grant any three wishes that are within my powers."

"Three!" Kuririn hollered.

Dende pried his eyes from the Dragon and turned to the bald man, saying, "That's right! He can grant three wishes!"

"Incredible!" Kuririn followed Dende's example and glanced down at Gohan, "The home Shenron is incredible! I have a good feeling about this."

"How about we use them?" Gohan egged on. Dende agreed, turning suddenly solemn.

"Hurry!" he urged them, "Freeza and Vegeta may be here soon!"

Gohan and Kuririn's pupils narrowed in surprise. They had completely forgotten their surroundings in the rush of the experience. Turning to each other, they nodded confidently and decided on the first wish.

It was all black. Except for him. Except for Freeza. He stood sneering over the five-year-old Vegeta in a nebulous void. Any other child would have wept for the fear of it, yet Vegeta did not budge. He had his feet planted firmly in an unseen floor and his arms crossed characteristically while his tail thrashed fiercely behind him.

"King Vegeta is dead, my dear," the smooth, feminine ring of Freeza's voice cut through the boy's ears, "He was on the planet, too, when the asteroid came."

The child felt as if the boat of his gut careened. Something was so saccharine about the lizard-man's consolation. Something had to be amiss. Vegeta was only a boy, though, and he had little cognizance of his surroundings, especially when everything was so swathed in darkness. Nonetheless, his gut forced him to test the waters, to sniff out the truth behind it all. What it was that he was testing and sniffing, he could not say.

"So what?" he scoffed, "I could've beaten him. Anyone could've. Had you wanted to, you wouldn't even have needed to lift a finger."

Freeza grinned deviously.

Savoring a flashback of the destruction of Planet Vegeta, he responded enigmatically, "I would have needed to lift one finger. Only one."

What did that mean? Only one? Determined to dig further into something he did not understand to find an answer he could not fathom, he stared into Freeza's cold eyes. This angered the tyrant. Freeza lurched forward and grappled the boy's unguarded tail. Vegeta toppled over in pain as he felt his tail compress within Freeza's stony grip.

"Please! Please!" the child Saiyajin whimpered to his torturer. Begging for mercy, his eyes were full of repentance. At that, Freeza smiled an honest smile. He opened his mouth as if to speak when suddenly, the voice did not match the body. It was a low rumbling, like thunder, pounding into the ears from every side of the blackness. It was loud, so loud that the boy Vegeta closed his eyes to wince.

"Understood!" It said, "I will grant you the first wish!"

Vegeta wrenched his eyes open. He was no longer a boy. He was grown and strong. He rested his back and head on the leg of Freeza's abandoned spaceship.

"Something is coming here!" he growled to himself, feeling a tremendous ki enveloping the planet, "It's incredibly strong! It must be Freeza!"

Vegeta hauled himself to his feet with a vexed expression plastered on his face. Then he realized it. The sky was black.

"What is this!" he roared, perplexed in his rage, like a general would in the midst of heated battle, "Why is the sky black! This planet doesn't have a night!"

The figure of the Dragon loomed on the edge of Vegeta's vision. Vegeta hurled around to soak in the image of the beast completely, his mouth ajar. He screamed with wrath, without words. He screamed a throat-tearing bellow.

"What is that! What is that monster!" He chased his eyes around the whole scene before him in order to make some sense of it. He noticed there was something missing. Then he went livid.

"The Dragon Balls! Kakarrot's brat! They're gone! Damn, damn, damn! Those brats tricked me!"

Vegeta darted toward the Dragon with his anger rolling into an overflowing boil. A vein pulsed in his forehead, and his eyes bulged a little as he, like a stroke of lightning, fired through the air. Soon, he could spot three dots standing before the glowing Dragon Balls.

The thunder voice of the Dragon rumbled again, "This is simple! I will grant your second wish!"

Second wish? Already the cursed traitors had squandered two precious wishes, two wishes he, Vegeta, Prince of All Saiyajins, could have used! The boiling water of his wrath exploded into a frothy foam of madness.

"I have granted your second wish," the Dragon boomed, "Now what is your third."

Vegeta would sooner be damned than let them take another of his wishes, if any wishes remained, that is. He slammed into the earth, dust and rock crumbling and flying beneath his leaden footing. Before him were the three imbeciles—Kuririn, the brat, and one of those green things. They groped around dully, calling out "Piccolo!" in a weak-willed manner.

The madness took Vegeta and actually became visible, as his spit bubbled out of the side of his mouth through the force of his vibrating growl. He clenched his teeth hard, using every little tension as a release of his rage. His fists, too, squeezed together as he stooped forward in a feral fighting stance. The edge of his tongue caught between his teeth, but he continued to clamp his jaws together, biting the edge straight off. Red mixed with the white foam now pouring from Vegeta's mouth; it matched the color of his protruding, veiny eyes.

Hearing Vegeta's crash landing, the three imbeciles whirled around toward him. They gaped in fear when they saw the awful sight. At the slightest provocation, it seemed that he would jump for the throat.

"So that's how it is!" he screamed, "How dare you leave me behind! I'm going to kill you!" The veins on his forehead pulsed visibly, rabidly, as his anger more and more seemed to want to physically burst through his being.

"Fools! You've just brought someone else to be killed by Freeza! The only way we can win is for me to become immortal! You little shits!"

He stepped toward them shakily, as though it were difficult for him to make any physical movement that did not cause death and destruction.

The three imbeciles cringed, and for fear the boy Gohan stuttered, "W-w-wait! We were granted three wishes! There's still one left!"

Kuririn turned to Gohan angrily, "Bakka! Shut up!"

Immediately, Vegeta's body was freed from some invisible weight. He was still incredibly tense and his eyes were still bloodshot, but the foaming stopped. He was able to move again without having to cause death—at least for the time being.

"I'm glad I heard that!" he sighed with a smile drowning his face. It was a smile that Kuririn and Gohan never saw him use before, not the entire time he was on Earth nor the entire time they fought beside him on Namek.

He parted his lips and bared his teeth. The smile looked more like a delighted snarl, but only due to lack of use. One could tell by glancing at him, that he looked to be witnessing a divine spectacle.

He was looking at himself, and he saw that he was god!

"Make me immortal now! Do it now! Freeza's almost here!" he commanded. The imbeciles hesitated, but he saw in their faces the realization that he was their only choice, the only divinity that could reach out a hand of mercy and pluck them away the pit of doom.

Sometimes, though, patience was not an option for god. One had to slap the imbeciles to save them from their blindness. So that is what he did. Vegeta lunged onto Dende and jerked the green boy to his face with two divine hands, trembling with excitement. Words were useless.

Grinding into Dende with onyx eyes, Vegeta shook the boy and slapped him over and over.

"Save your idiot planet, you imbecile!" Vegeta spat into the boy's face, "Save it by making me your savior!"

"Dende!" shouted Kuririn from behind Vegeta, "Grant his wish! He's pretty evil, but he's better than Freeza! It's our only way out of this!" Vegeta smirked proudly at the bald imbecile who had at last realized his place and Vegeta's power.

"Okay," Dende sighed. Vegeta let the green thing slip from his grasp and ordered the task be done. Dende turned toward the Dragon, while the Prince was overcome by that same toothy smile as before.

He thought to himself, "Now Freeza won't be able to kill me! And even if I can't beat him now, I'll be able to soon enough! The whole universe will be mine!"

Lifting his hands up, Dende pleaded for one last wish from the Dragon in his ancient tongue. The Dragon's red eyes flashed like a brooding thundercloud.

At last, it opened its broad, frog-like jaw to reveal rows of jagged teeth.

Then it slowly rumbled, "Your wish has been—"

Like a flash of lightning, it disappeared, and the black blanket on the heavens was removed. The Dragon was gone.

A/N : _That's right, ladies and gentlemen, I have decided to continue the story. I will be rereleasing an edited version of the original fifteen chapters in the meantime and then finally, I'll be updating._

_Thank you for reading. Please share your input!_


	3. Chapter Two: The Battle Begins

Chapter Two: The Battle Begins

"What in the hell just happened?" Vegeta roared at the empty sky above him. Kuririn and Gohan were no less perplexed. Seven spherical rocks plopped onto the ground with a loud thud.

"Where in the hell did those rocks come from?" Vegeta roared again, feeling a new surge of his frothing madness creep up his throat like bile. Dende had been standing silently, solemnly. His head hung down and his antennae sagged.

He at last discovered some will to live and replied to Vegeta's roars, "Those rocks are the Dragon Balls…the Great Elder has passed on. The Great Elder who made the Dragon Balls has died!"

"Damn you and your elders!" Vegeta hollered. He lunged onto Dende and shook the green boy like a rag doll.

Searching the Namek's saddened face, Vegeta urgently questioned, "Did I get my wish? Answer me! Am I immortal? I do not feel any different. Am I?"

Dende forced himself passed his grief and again replied, "I cannot say."

"Why can't you, you spinach-skinned fool?" Vegeta tossed Dende away as if the boy were leprous. Dende landed hard on his head, his temple chafing against the rocky earth. He lay limp for a moment.

"I cannot say," Dende groaned as his fingers pressed gingerly against his bleeding temple; he pushed himself onto his feet, "because I do not know if the Dragon intended to grant the wish upon finishing his words, or if his words were merely a confirmation of what he already granted. We cannot know."

"Then I'll find out myself!" Vegeta snarled. He curled out his arms. Flexing his muscles, he watched for any inconsistencies.

Maybe, just maybe he did feel different. Maybe, just maybe he got his wish. He concentrated. He tensed his body so that his veins bulged and he could feel his claret lifeline pound inside himself. He smirked with a sudden confidence in his possible immortality.

Then it left him, and he felt no different than before.

"Damn!" he growled, kicking his foot into the ground. A small dust cloud billowed into the air and swirled higher and faster as his foot dug more deeply. The others around him watched his every movement, ready to spring for cover from an outburst of Saiyajin rage.

"Why do I deceive myself?" he thought further, "I do not feel different at all! I merely tell myself that I do."

However, he could not dismiss his hopeful suspicions. He twirled the idea in his thoughts playfully.

Immortality. He could imagine the world of possibilities laid out before him, all because he could never die. It was a warrior's dream. He could fight and grow stronger and better unto eternity. If he ever should lose a battle again (an unlikely turn of events, he thought), then he could simply rise up and defeat the opponent in a rematch. He would be— certainly now— the strongest warrior in the universe.

The fantasy was seized by its tail and swung hard into the dust beneath his feet. The overwhelming ki of Freeza jolted Vegeta back into reality. He felt his confidence waver a moment but then scoffed at the thought of it.

"Like I have any cause to doubt myself!" he hissed in his thoughts, "I shall find a way to crush him, whether I am immortal or not." Finally, he freed his lips from his snarl to speak aloud.

"We'll know soon enough if your damned Dragon superstitions worked," Vegeta said to Dende.

He spun his glare sharply toward the two Earthlings and declared, "If we all die, if all this idiot world is destroyed, if all this inferior universe is snuffed out from existence, it will be your fault. You left me behind."

It was too late for blame, however.

"F-f-fr," Kuririn blathered, "Freeza!"

Yes, there stood Freeza before them on the edge of a cliff. He was small and doll-like in appearance, yet he harbored inside a deep well of power at which Kuririn, Gohan, Dende, and even Vegeta cringed.

"You've done it now!" Freeza's feminine voice shrieked, "You've stolen my dream of becoming immortal!" His glower suddenly flipped into an intrigued grin, "There's no trace of Ginyu's Special Forces. Did you kill them all? I don't know how you did it, but I wasn't expecting it. It's too bad that Vegeta came so close to becoming immortal before the Dragon Balls turned to stone. But it's much worse for me, don't you think?"

The glower returned.

"I won't forgive you," he calmly said.

Then he exploded into a frothy madness much like Vegeta's.

"I hate you, you insects!" he fumed, "I'm going to kill you slowly!" He brandished a well pampered but powerful fist. He dematerialized and then reappeared only a few yards away from Vegeta and the others.

"I won't let a single one of you away!" Freeza screamed, "Prepare to die!"

Kuririn and Gohan swallowed deeply, but Vegeta burst into deriding laughter.

"At last, dear lord emperor Freeza," he spewed, "you've revealed your true nature. But if you think you can kill me that easily, you've made a big mistake. Didn't you hear our conversation at all?" Freeza reined his blood-lust for a moment to hear what the man had to say. Full of pride, Vegeta crossed his arms and lifted up his chin.

"I got my wish before those marbles turned to stone," he sneered, "I am immortal. I can never be killed. You may as well bow before me and kiss my feet, just as you made me, lizard-man!"

In unison, all those around Vegeta swung their faces to look upon him in disbelief.

"Is he bluffing?" Gohan whispered to Kuririn, "Has he felt any changes he didn't tell us about?"

"With his ego," Kuririn whispered back, "it's hard to tell."

Freeza doubled over, grasping at his side in laughter.

"My, oh, my!" he howled scornfully, "I always knew you to be a base and contemptible coward, but with your bravado, I never figured you were the type to be driven mad with fear. But it seems even I, Lord Freeza, can be wrong."

Vegeta smirked, battle smoldering in his eyes.

"But not about your death," Freeza's amusement vanished and he donned a look of black hate, "about that, I am right. For you will die—now!"

With that, Freeza groaned in exertion as he summoned some of his power from the depth of his being. The Earthlings and Dende nearly toppled over with fear, and Vegeta's smug smirk transformed into a frown.

"There's no way we can beat him," uttered Kuririn beneath his breath. A breeze carried the words to Freeza's ear, and the the tyrant smiled wide.

"Of course not!" he shouted to the bald man, "Do you think three ants could defeat a dinosaur?"

Vegeta shouted back at these words, "I can beat you! You are but a lowly mortal, but I shall live unto eternity. You don't stand a chance against me. Which is why I'm feeling merciful—as gods should feel on occasion for the sake of their servants' perpetuation.

"I won't dwarf you immediately. In fact, I'll hold back most of my power and let these two take you on with me. I think they could rough you up enough so that I wouldn't have to lift a finger to finish you off…strike that, I will have to lift a finger, won't I? But only one." Vegeta lifted his index in front of his face.

Freeza smiled only more widely at this reference.

He spat, "You must've spent all your time in brothels while you were on Earth. That'd explain where you got the disease that drove you into even considering sedition."

"Sedition requires you be my superior," Vegeta jeered, "But the mighty always prevail. And is not an immortal, is not a god, is not the Legendary Super Saiyajin—that thing which you fear most— the mightiest in the entire universe? Am I not then your superior?" Freeza froze at these words.

"Wow," Kuririn rasped to Gohan, "this guy's so full of himself, he's about to burst. But he's never gone this far. Maybe he isn't bluffing?"

Immediately, Freeza mustered his senses.

With his battle-face grin, he heckled, "It's easy to make empty boasts like that. There's no such thing as a Super Saiyajin."

Then there was nothing left of Freeza but a blurry streak of color burning through the air. Freeza's fist tore forward, aimed straight at the Prince's face. In barely enough time, Vegeta reached up a hand and grappled the fist. Hardly able to breathe through the effort, Vegeta heaved with his whole body to move the struggling fist aside.

Freeza threw his other fist forward. The Prince caught it, as well. The two enemies stood peering at one another, inching closer to each other's face. They could smell the rancorous breath seething through their convulsing snarls.

An eddy of hidden emotion churned in Vegeta's eyes. Was he the Super Saiyajin? Was he immortal? If he was, why then did it take so much strength to hold back so weak a punch? It was time to get serious. It was time for the battle to begin.

Letting sweat pour down his face, the Prince began to tighten his whole body. Every part of him, every limb constricted, from his fingers to his toes. His eyes went as bloodshot as before, when he lost himself in his frothy madness. Then abruptly, he loosened his whole body. Reaching down to the bottom of his lungs, he started to sound out a ferocious war cry.

As Freeza watched the spectacle, he grew uneasy. The strength of his punches weakened with distraction as the number on his scouter bound higher and higher.

"What!" Freeza exclaimed as the scouter burst. Vegeta swung himself free from Freeza's fists and landed several yards away from the lizard-man. He was panting with the weight of his newly summoned energy.

"Ha ha ha!" Freeza grinned, "So the mad man has some basis for his ego! Perhaps this may be just a little more fun than I had expected."

"I think I understand Vegeta's plan now," Gohan muttered to his bald friend, indistinctly to any outside ears, "He mentioned us fighting with him. If we all three attack Freeza, we might win! Sure, he's strong, but we've gotten pretty strong ourselves."

"That's right," Kuririn looked to be near a smile, "Vegeta's overcome barriers while he's been here even if he didn't get his wish, so he's still incredibly strong. But," he turned back to Freeza, "why then is Freeza acting so oddly calm?"

"Transform, Freeza!" Vegeta commanded, "You're going to do it anyway, so do it now. Show us your true form! Perhaps, then, the council of immortal gods will find cause to be impressed and have me dispose of you in a more merciful manner."

"Tell me, Vegeta," Freeza clenched his fists, "Zarbon let that slip about my transformation, didn't he?" Vegeta only smiled. Freeza went on, "In any case, alright! If you really are so desperate to be freed from the jaws of your insanity, so be it. Let the games begin."

Gohan and Kuririn turned their heads about, looking at each other, then at the smirking Prince, and then at the maddened tyrant.

"Transformation?" the two wondered. They found their questions quickly answered when Freeza's body looked like it was being kicked and tugged by a million little creatures writhing beneath his skin.

Freeza bellowed a menacing laugh, and the Earthlings shook with fear.

"Don't worry," Vegeta scoffed, "He's just bluffing! He won't change that much."

"Ha!" Freeza snickered demonically, "Do you think so?" His armor burst off with the strain of his energy. His limbs and his torso pulled out sideways and longwise. His neck stretched up and his satanic horns curved out farther.

He had grown to be twice the size of all the fighters combined. His feet pawed at the ground, making him look like a bull in front of a red flag. As his eyes hungrily scanned over his audience, he bucked his horns in a visceral blood-lust that none could ever tame.

"Watch out!" Freeza snorted his hot, bull breath through two sniveling nostrils, "You asked me to do this. Now I can't be as nice as I was before!"

"Im-impossible," Vegeta uttered. He stared in a blank. He did not know how to compute what had just occurred.

All his life, Vegeta had been bowing and fawning beneath Freeza to avoid death, and that was before he even knew about the "transformation," before he even knew how truly powerful Freeza was. Now Vegeta felt as if he had not even grazed the surface of the tyrant's power; he had been afraid of something without even knowing how truly dangerous that thing was. He was completely in the dark.

"Is this a nightmare?" he heard Kuririn lament.

"W-we're all gonna die," he heard the half-blood brat stutter.

"I've gotten too much power," the now deeper voice of Freeza heaved, "My fighting strength can't be less than 1,000,000 now. It might be a bit hard to hold back!"

Bracing themselves for the fight to come, the Saiyajin and the Earthlings bent further into their fighting stances—but it made no difference. With one wave of his hand, Freeza sent a burst of energy toward his foes. Dende, Vegeta, and the Earthlings felt an invisible force lift them up off their feet and hurl them into the distance.

They were thrown back like old trash. Shattered rocks and billowing dust from the blast catapulted across their cheeks. In the midst of the confusion, Kuririn at last regained control. Against the violent gusts of the blast and the painful pounding of flying rocks, he saw the boy Dende helplessly falling. Swiftly, Kuririn flew forward, and at the last minute, he caught the boy.

"Kuririn! Dende!" Gohan cried through subsiding dust.

"We're here!" Kuririn floated above his friend, holding the Namek.

"I'm impressed!" they heard Freeza call after them, "You are all so good at running! But that was just the beginning."

_Rip_ was the sound that bit into the air when Freeza suddenly appeared centimeters from Kuririn. Like the frenzied bull he was, Freeza had charged a horn straight through the center of the bald man's chest. No one was even able to see the move, when without warning Kuririn's arms went limp. The Namek he was holding fell down toward the ground in shock, watching the receding image of his Earthling friend impaled by the horn of Freeza.

"Kuririn!" Gohan cried. Dende pulled to and floated up and away from the scene.

"Imbecile!" Vegeta mumbled angrily, "We're already down one warrior because the fool was too worried about that Namek-seijin brat!"

"Oops!" Freeza feigned surprise, "Sorry! I must have an even slighter hold on my power than I realized." He tossed his horn aside, and Kuririn's body flung into the ocean with a splash. Gohan dashed after his friend; he nearly smashed into a broad, deep chest when Freeza simply appeared in front of him, as if out of nowhere.

"Were you going to try to help him? It's impossible, you know," Freeza mocked, "He's almost dead. Why don't you worry more about yourself?"

"Get—get out of my way," Gohan clenched his fists. The tyrant smiled, daring the boy to make him.

"Get out of my way!" Gohan yelled. His old childhood tantrums were called forth from the depths of his swollen heart, and he erupted into a fiery passion. He swung a foot at Freeza and kicked the tyrant's head to the side with force. Quickly, he followed up with an under punch, hammering Freeza's chin toward the heavens. With a final punch and kick to the stomach, Freeza went flying off.

"Ugh!" Gohan grunted as he collected a massive energy ball and then hurled it straight into Freeza. The ball dragged the tyrant into the ground. But that was not enough for the enraged half-blood. He felt the Saiyajin inside him curdle hungrily. He thirsted for the blood of his enemy. Heaving volley after volley of ki blasts, Gohan lit the whole sky white. He panted heavily once he was done and turned his eyes toward the nearby ocean.

Dende was swimming toward the shore, pulling Kuririn's unconscious body behind him.

"He's okay!" Dende called to Gohan above, "He's still alive!"

"Don't die Kuriri—" Gohan grumbled.

"Shut up!" Vegeta cut off, "We don't have time to worry about him! Do you think that was enough to kill Freeza?" Since the tyrant finally began to unravel his true power, Vegeta himself was not entirely sure what was enough to kill Freeza, but that half-blood brat's childish fits certainly amounted to nothing.

Looking down, Gohan confirmed Vegeta's words. Freeza pushed himself to his feet, unaffected by the stampede of attacks he had just experienced.

"Damn you! You're not a normal shrimp," Freeza sneered to Gohan, "That hurt even me—a little bit. But I'm too powerful for you; all you got is my anger!" With that, he summoned even more power, and his ki blasted to new heights. Vegeta and Gohan went stiff as the power seemed to devour their courage.

"The pain I received," Freeza said, "I'm going to return many times over." He drifted into the air, hovering in front of the small boy. Gohan was stuck in place with fear and could not move, like a fly trapped in a web, watching as the glutted spider wriggled closer.

"Idiot!" Vegeta screamed from several yards behind the boy, "Get out of there!"

_Slap_. And Gohan went hurtling into the ground. He could barely move due to the force of Freeza's blow.

"You haven't been hurt yet!" Freeza yelled after him, "The fun hasn't even started!"

A deep and throaty war cry rang in the air, and from behind Freeza felt a wave of energy envelop him. Freeza brushed off the annoyance and glanced over his shoulder to see a mortified Prince.

"Don't be disappointed, Vegeta!" Freeza chuckled, "As soon as I'm done with this brat, I'll play with you, too!"

Freeza floated down to the ground next to the half-blood child, leaving the Prince floating in the sky, dumbfounded. Vegeta's attack had done absolutely nothing to the tyrant. How could he possibly have gotten his wish? How could he possibly win?

From then on, Vegeta's participation in the battle diminished. Even after a small hope revealed itself, when Dende disclosed his healing abilities and recovered Kuririn's and Gohan's strength, Vegeta did nothing. He shrank into a bystander who looked on doubtfully.


	4. Chapter Three: Defeat without Honor

Chapter Three: Defeat without Honor

He had been bluffing. The whole time, it was just a charade. Why else would he fail to do anything? Why else would he just watch on the sidelines while Freeza battered Kuririn and Gohan back and forth like the tide of the sea? Dende of all people turned out to be more useful than him. If anything, Vegeta had been bluffing, but Freeza, emperor of wiles, had been telling the stark truth.

When Freeza transformed the first time, the three fighters and Dende had assumed that this was the near peak of his ability. Yet, when Piccolo finally arrived, having been resurrected and transported to Namek with the first two wishes from the Dragon Balls, their assumption proved wrong.

Piccolo's power had vastly increased. As the wind tossed his white robe and his antennae to the side, he practically oozed power. Kuririn and Gohan recoiled at the presence of the green man. They were grateful that the Namek no longer aligned himself with darkness. Hope beamed through their desperation. They thought, for a moment, that Piccolo could win the battle.

Then, it came. Freeza struck one elbow across the green man's face, and Piccolo went whirling into the ground. Dust billowed high into the air and rocks were pulverized into powder with the impact.

Piccolo thrust himself to his feet. He already looked defeated. The beam of hope that flickered in the Earthlings' eyes swiftly disappeared. As Freeza gloated over the beaten figure of his opponent, Piccolo tossed off his weighted clothing.

"I can also hide my real ki!" Piccolo taunted the tyrant. The smile of battle was on both their faces. Piccolo reached out his green hands and clenched them into fists.

"You murderer!" Piccolo hollered, "Feel the wrath of the Namek-seijin!"

Gohan cheered on his old friend and teacher raucously. Hope emerged its minuscule presence once more, that is, until Freeza transformed. Again.

"Is there no end to this beast's power?" Vegeta hissed to himself. He was floating beside the two Earthlings and was watching in insincere disinterest as the transformation progressed.

Spikes ripped out of Freeza's back, and his face became round and elongated like a sausage. Regardless of his nearly comical shape, his power had once again rocketed to new, unimaginable heights.

"Sorry for the wait," Freeza sneered, "We can now begin the second round."

There remained not a single indication that he had been fighting intensely with the Earthlings and the Namek. Perhaps this was because he wasn't fighting intensely. They were all so weak before him that he could hardly call this a light exercise.

Piccolo dashed into the sky at top speed. Before he could get far, he screeched to a halt. Freeza was already in front of him and floated there, waiting. With one slight motion, Freeza shot a beam through Piccolo's leg, and then grazed his cheek and the side of his ribcage. With torrent after torrent of piercing prods, Freeza bore innumerable little holes into the Namek's body.

Gohan felt tears gather in his eyes. He sped into the sky thoughtlessly to save his friend.

"Crap!" Kuririn cursed, making as if to follow the boy, but he was unexpectedly held back. He swerved his head in annoyance to see that Vegeta was holding him by the arm. The Prince had a look of genuine fear, something Kuririn had never seen before.

"You can't do anything!" Vegeta growled. He released the bald man once he saw that Kuririn knew the truth of the words. In an instant, though, he wrenched the little man closer by the front of the battle suit.

"Hit me so that I'm almost dead!" Vegeta suddenly commanded. Kuririn gave the Prince a baffled leer. Vegeta shook the man hard and explained, "I think it is clear now that your Dragon Balls and your wishes are nothing but damnable lies and the superstitions of spinach-faced imbeciles! Our only hope now is to make me stronger!"

Vegeta turned his eyes onto the small green boy, Dende, who was cowering behind a mountainside.

Spewing drops of saliva onto Kuririn's face, Vegeta spoke violently, "I may not be immortal, but if I can come back from the point of death one more time, I'll certainly become the Super Saiyajin!"

Before they could do anything, there was a tremendous explosion. Gohan had thrown a full-powered blast at Freeza. The tyrant barely evaded the attack; he stood there gawking at Gohan. The alien's wheels were turning as he tried to piece together the boy's origins.

Kuririn was yanked again by his battle suit.

Vegeta screamed, "Listen! As you know, we Saiyajins grow stronger each time we come back from near death. Do it before Freeza can morph again! You have to hit me now!"

"B-but," Kuririn protested, "I am not strong enough."

"I'll weaken my defenses, idiot! Then the Namek brat can heal me."

"Even if I hate you, I can't do that," Kuririn refused, "Goku is almost healed and—"

"Kakarrot is not an elite fighter," Vegeta furiously interjected, "He'll never get stronger! Now do as I say, cue ball head!"

Then they felt it. Again, Freeza's power zoomed beyond comprehension, rattling his physical exterior with the exhausting well of power.

"Look well!" Freeza called out while transforming, "Here's my last morph!"

Vegeta desperately clung to Kuririn's battle armor and hollered, "It's our last chance, fool! Do it now!" He felt a cold puncture cleave through his stomach and fell straight into the ground.

"Good, good," he thought to himself, "To hell with immortality. I will be the Super Saiyajin now."

"What did Kuririn do to Vegeta?" Gohan racked his brain. He heard someone call out his name. It was Piccolo.

"We've got to get out of here!" Piccolo shouted to the boy. Gohan curtly nodded, and the two scurried off while the tyrant transformed. Piccolo, injured from battle, hung weakly from the boy's shoulder. Placing his teacher gently on the ground, Gohan darted away in search of Dende. Kuririn quickly joined him in the search while unraveling Vegeta's plan.

After a moment, the two Earthlings saw the green boy fly off from a profusely bleeding Vegeta who was sprawled across the ground, unconscious.

"Dende!" they shouted after the boy. The boy took no heed of them and landed beside Piccol to lay healing hands on the tired warrior. Piccolo jumped to his feet and wondered at his newly recovered strength.

"Dende," Kuririn cried while Gohan and he urgently ran to the green boy's side, "I understand that you don't want to heal Vegeta. But we can't do anything without him!"

"He's just like Freeza," the boy shot back, "He killed Nameks!"

"Please," Piccolo spoke that word he rarely ever used, "I can beat Vegeta, but not Freeza. We need the man's strength."

An orb of light burst into the sky, surrounding Freeza. His transformation was nearly finished. Kuririn, Gohan, Piccolo, and Dende looked on in awe.

"Please, Dende," Gohan stumbled out, "You have to heal Vegeta!" Dende immediately flew off and went to heal Vegeta.

"There he is," Piccolo murmured as the billowing dust of the explosion moved aside to reveal Freeza's final form.

Again, it was all back. Except for him. Except for Vegeta. He was not a child this time but a grown man in his battle armor. Although there was nothing around him but the nebulous void, Vegeta could sense another presence. He could feel the throbbing ki of Freeza enclose around him from every direction. It was a suffocating ki, squeezing at Vegeta's lungs until he was nearly hyperventilating in his desperate, deep gasps for air.

"What are you to do now, Dear Prince?" the gnawing voice of Freeza echoed through Vegeta's ears, "Your little plan for eternity did not work, and now your little plan for becoming the Super Monkey failed, too. What, oh, what shall you do?"

"I shall tear your throat out," Vegeta panted, "and then I shall give you a new one, so that I might strangle you with the old!" Then Vegeta realized he was dreaming, for he would never dare to make such threats against his former master in reality, even in the midst of battle.

Sudden warmth circulated through Vegeta's veins, and the Prince was paralyzed with dread and hate. The frothy madness boiled inside him, but he could do nothing. Freeza had tormented Vegeta with more ingenuity than one could possibly imagine, but now the tyrant had managed to find a way to hurt the Prince inside his very being.

"No!" Vegeta closed his eyes in disbelief, "Impossible!"

He opened his eyes again. The void was gone. The green face of Dende stooped over him. The warmth he felt had been the Namek healing power pumping through his body. Lunging to his feet, Vegeta examined himself.

"You little brat!" Vegeta yelled, kneeing the boy to the ground, "You took your damned time, now didn't you? You're lucky that I'm letting you live, worm!"

Vegeta wheeled around toward the direction of Freeza's newly empowered ki.

"Well, well, Freeza," Vegeta smirked, "It looks like you're wrong. I am a Super Saiyajin."

He watched the small, white figure of Freeza march mechanically out of the dust.

"I'll kill you, lizard," he sneered, and then reflecting on his past life in the time it took to snap a finger, he concluded brutally, "I'll kill you all!"

Before anything further could happen, a ray of energy shot passed his ear. Through his eyes it looked like nothing more than a faint rod of light that flickered, maybe, for a millisecond. Vegeta turned his head to see what damage the ray had done.

It had pierced the heart of Dende. The boy collapsed on the ground, dead.

"No one can heal you now," Freeza spoke with a cold voice, shred of all feeling. He evaporated and rematerialized behind the two Earthling and Piccolo.

Pointing a finger up like a lecturing parent, he said, "I told you, didn't I? You'll fear my display of power more than Hell itself!"

All three fighters bound onto Freeza like a pack of wild dogs, punching, kicking, and lunging. Every time, they missed. Fists flew; ki blasts pounded down. Yet every time, they missed. Through the dust of their attacks, they saw that Freeza was no longer there.

"He's behind you!" they heard Vegeta shout. Looking behind their backs, the three saw the tyrant standing there, bored. With only two lifted fingers, he shot two thin beams of light at Gohan. The boy was petrified with terror. Then he felt himself kicked to the earth, headlong.

"Look out, fool!" Vegeta cursed as he kicked the brat away. The beams scathed passed Gohan and quickly obliterated an entire mountain beyond them. Kuririn and Piccolo stared at the mayhem confusedly while Gohan pulled back onto his feet, rubbing the now bruised cheek that Vegeta had kicked.

"We can't even see the attacks," mumbled Kuririn despondently, "But Vegeta can…did the plan work?"

"Thanks for saving me," Gohan grumbled to the Prince.

Vegeta shrugged with disdain, "Idiot, I do not care whether you live or die. I just need an audience. I want you to see me get serious. It's my turn to fight." He bared his teeth in a snarl-smile.

"How can you be so sure of victory?" Piccolo scoffed. Vegeta ignored the green man and locked his eyes on his target.

"You really are insane, aren't you, little prince?" Freeza chuckled.

Immediately, Vegeta brandished a fist and yelled, "Now it's my turn to laugh! I am what you fear the most…the Super Saiyajin!" Chasing away his moment's fear, Freeza laughed, covering his mouth with his hand.

"Kakarrot will not be the next one!" Vegeta shouted as he charged forward. He chopped his arm toward Freeza, but the lizard-man vanished and appeared again yards behind Vegeta.

"Clearly, you cannot best my superior speed," Freeza reasoned, "The Super Saiyajin is only a stupid legend."

"Little shit," Vegeta uttered under his breath. The frothy madness tossed once more inside him like a wave crashing against cold rock. The mounting disappointment in himself and his failures began to sting like freshly-shed tears.

He, a Saiyajin of royal blood, was enslaved by a lizard. He, a Saiyajin of royal blood, was defeated by that third-class nothing. He, a Saiyajin destined to be the greatest warrior in the universe, had been denied his wish. A rage flew up his lungs and his throat.

"I am the Super Saiyajin!" he screamed, "Die, Freeza!"

An immense power, enough to destroy a small planet, warped out of Vegeta's palms and plunged straight down into Freeza. The bystanders gasped in surprise at the sudden release of energy. It cascaded downward toward its victim, and like a train, nothing seemed able to stop it—except another head-on train.

That, then, was what Freeza must have been. For without effort, he leapt into the air and kicked the monstrous ball of energy into space.

"This time," Freeza said once he regained his footing, "I'm doing some serious damage."

Vegeta did nothing. A true fear gripped his whole being, and for the first time in his life, he trembled with dread. Sweat seeped down his forehead. Tears seeped out of his eyes in ineffable frustration. He saw his reflection in the peering eyes of Freeza, and there was nothing but incompetence.

He now knew indisputably, he was no immortal. He was no Super Saiyajin. He was nothing but weak, weak, weak. All his life he had striven for strength, yet he had been nothing but Freeza's feeble little play-thing all along. Now he would die Freeza's broken little play-thing. There was no avoiding it. He had lost the war.

He put up no defenses. He let himself plummet into the dirt when Freeza flew up and kicked him down. He sagged limply as Freeza landed behind him and with a long sinuous tail, raised him off the ground by the neck in a strangle-hold. Piccolo, Gohan, and Kuririn did not help but only gawked with fear as Vegeta's ki dwindled.

Freeza pummeled his fists again and again into the Prince's back. As each punch ruptured into the Prince's spine, he was forced to exhale fiercely. The exhalations carried with them spit and blood, both of which projected far into the air before it splashed in the dust and dried into a black crust.

Freeza spun his tail around, flinging Vegeta into the face of a mountainside, where the Saiyajin's numb body then swiftly tumbled into the dirt. Red dribbled through his lips, staining his face from jaw to chin, as he lay exhausted on the ground.

"Boring. Your ki's almost gone. It's time to finish you," Freeza droned in his saccharine voice as he stared down at his victim. He pressed a foot on Vegeta's chest, cracking ribs, and cocked his arm back, ready to strike the Prince clean through the face.

Suddenly two feet alighted hurriedly on the ground. Freeza froze in his position and glanced sidelong to see a tall Saiyajin drenched with the blue liquid of the rejuvenation machines. The man was panting with an eagerness for battle.

"The Dragon Balls sent you back?" With a somber frown chiseled on his visage, Goku strode passed Piccolo. Piccolo nodded bluntly at the man's question.

Goku continued toward Freeza, thinking aloud, "Somehow I will…Now that I'm healed, there's no way I can lose."

He stopped only a few paces from Freeza and Vegeta's exhausted body.

"Are you Freeza?" Goku asked, looking to the small, purple and white tyrant, "You think you're unbeatable…"

"Well, well, there's still some garbage left," Freeza murmured.

"Let Vegeta be," Goku commanded, "I promise to be a better fighter."

The two watched each other, carefully, carefully.

Meanwhile, words raced through Vegeta's thoughts faster than he could hear.

"Damn the damnable lies of that damned green lizard and his damned yellow marbles," Vegeta thought as his spirit leaked out of his body, "They gave me a false hope. I should've known that Fate would rob me of my vengeance." He was slapped back into reality when he heard a disgustingly familiar voice say his name. Prying open his heavy lids, he saw the tall figure of Kakarrot looking taller than ever.

"Ka-Kakarrot," Vegeta groaned with difficulty, "You…"

"Kakarrot!" Freeza's eyes narrowed as he thought to himself, "That's a Saiyajin name."

"One more Saiyajin won't make a difference," Freeza spoke aloud, "Fool…you'll die loudly."

"Don't you worry about me. Worry about yourself," Goku coldly retorted as he readied himself with a fighting stance.

Immediately, Freeza lunged his foot at Goku's face. Goku dodged and coupled the evasion with a hard kick to Freeza's cheek. Freeza stepped back a pace to coddle his new bruise. He smiled and, lifting two fingers, shot out a shower of light.

"Move, Goku!" Kuririn squealed as Gohan, Piccolo, and he ducked for cover. Goku slapped the beams of light away with only his left hand.

Freeza stared in shock. Laughter tore at his ears; he angrily glanced down to see the weak Vegeta chuckling at Freeza's surprise.

"Freeza," Vegeta coughed up blood, "is that your best? You should indeed fear him. He's a…" he wheezed, "a Su…" he coughed halfheartedly, "Super Saiyajin!"

Freeza went numb.

"It's true!" Vegeta persisted, his voice growing weaker as he tried to speak more loudly, "It's the legend of the greatest warrior in the universe…the Super Saiyajin! F—" he stammered through his weary pants, "Freeza…you'll be in your grave soon! You'll get what you deserve!"

Suddenly, Vegeta collapsed back onto the ground. His head landed with an audible thud.

Gohan and Kuririn did not see the strike, but by the outstretched arm and forefingers of Freeza, they knew. Freeza had shot the Prince through the heart.

"Finally, you're dead," Freeza sneered, "I finally got rid of that joke of a killer."

Vegeta clawed at the dirt with his hands. He tried but failed to clear his throat as blood teemed like a river through his throat and out of his mouth. As red dribbled down his jaw, he looked like a lion with a fresh kill. Except now, he was the kill.

"Vegeta!" Goku exclaimed.

He turned rabidly toward Freeza and barked, "Vegeta was paralyzed! You didn't need to kill him."

Ignoring Goku's shouts, the Prince let words scurry through his thoughts.

"Damn the damnable lies of that damned green lizard and his damned yellow marbles," Vegeta thought to himself again, as all sight went red, "Where's my immortality now?"

"He was stuck with his idea of a Super Saiyajin," Freeza justified, "But it's only legend. I don't like stubborn people."

"Where's my immortality now?" Vegeta's thought echoed in his mind. He felt a cold blanket snake up his body, shrouding him with blackness.

No. Not yet. He forced the cold away.

"Ka-Kakarrot!" Vegeta mumbled to the standing man beside him. Goku looked down.

Vegeta persisted through his pain, through the gnawing cold, "You're still too naïve…too much to be…to be a Super Saiyajin. B-be heartless…and cold-blooded. You…you could become a Super Saiyajin if—if—if you were more realistic."

"I can't be heartless like you," Goku sighed, averting his eyes from the grisly sight of Vegeta, "and I didn't understand all your stories about Super Saiyajins."

Vegeta gagged up another wave of blood. Clearing his throat, he heaved out, "Th-the Super Saiyajins are…"

He felt the cold blanket grope his legs, and he faded out for a moment.

He was jogged back into consciousness by Kakarrot's plea, "Stop talking! You'll die!"

"L…listen well, Kakarrot," Vegeta ignored the plea, "Planet Vegeta, our planet, our mother planet…wasn't destroyed by an asteroid—"

"My, my!" Freeza howled with annoyance, crossing his arms, "I pierced a hole through his heart, and still he keeps blathering!"

"I—it's Freeza who destroyed it," Vegeta continued, "Us Saiyajins were slaves to him. Except for us they were all exterminated. Your parents. My father, the king…all that because Freeza was afraid of Super Saiyajins."

"What nonsense is he weeping about?" Freeza scoffed. The others, though, listened in amazemant at this revelation.

With the last of his strength, Vegeta choked out, letting salty tears stain his cheeks, "I…I beg of you! Eliminate Freeza! Please…he must die from the hands of a Saiyajin."

The cold took him.

"Where's my immortality now?" he thought. Then he faded out of consciousness.


	5. Chapter Four: Eternity Revealed

Chapter Four: Eternity Revealed

"Vegeta," Goku whispered through near closed lips. He hung down his head in reverence for the fallen soldier and examined the stout yet muscular body.

"You cried, Vegeta," he muttered, "You asked me a favor. I imagine your rage."

"He's dead?" squawked Freeza impatiently, "Not a moment too soon! Can we continue our horror show?"

Goku flashed his eyes at a patch of dirt a few yards from Vegeta's body. A hole appeared, six feet deep, six feet long.

"It wasn't because all the Saiyajins died," Goku breathed out, hoisting Vegeta's body from the ground, "You're sorry you were manipulated be Freeza," he gently rested the body in the hole, "I hated you, but I must admit you were worthy of the name Saiyajin," respectfully continuing, he filled the hole with dirt, "I will follow your advice," he stood to his feet, leering angrily at Freeza, "I was raised on Earth, but I am also a Saiyajin."

Goku returned to his fighting stance.

"For all the Saiyajins and Namek you killed," he boomed at Freeza while raising a fist, "I will annihilate you!"

"Stop saying stupid things," Freeza yawned. The tension between the two fumed in the air as their powers pulsed against each other.

"Don't die, Dad! Crush him!" Goku heard his son call out before the boy flew off to safety with Kuririn and Piccolo.

Goku ran forward, and the fight began.

It was not all black this time. It was not anything. Vegeta did not even have a body. He was some incorporeal essence whose existence was not sensed but simply known—and what he knew was that he was running. There was some force behind him, literally on his tail; it filled him with uncertainty.

Freeza. It had to be. Who else would he, Vegeta, run from? No. It was not Freeza. He did not sense that it was someone, something else behind him. He simply knew it. The thing was chasing him. He had to run away; he had to escape it.

Suddenly, his tail was clutched mercilessly. He began to be dragged into the jaws of his invisible enemy. He knew that the fangs of the thing were clamping closer and closer to his essence.

Then there was the light.

Before he could be devoured by the thing, a white light blazed into the nothingness like a torch in a benighted cavern. The light suffocated the nothingness and with one wide sweep replaced it all with a nebulous void.

Vegeta had regained his full-grown body with his battle armor. He saw that there was a hole on the left side of the breastplate. Studying it further, he saw that the hole in the suit was only revealing a whole in his chest, which then revealed his heart. It beat fast and hard, like one would expect from a Saiyajin. Strangely, though, the heart, too, had a hole in it. Still, it kept on beating.

Tearing his eyes from his heart, Vegeta examined his surroundings. Like he had grown so accustomed to, it was an infinite emptiness. He was dazzled by how far infinity truly was, but then he realized that the void was not black this time. It was a bleary white light. He had to be somewhere else. Always, he slumbered in black, never white. He had to be somewhere else.

"Where am I?" he heard himself say.

"Impressive!" a throaty voice brayed from behind Vegeta, "You claim to be the strongest and keenest in the universe, yet you can't even figure out where you are?"

Savagely, Vegeta spun around to see the fool who insulted him. No one was there.

"I'm over here!" the voice teased, again from behind. Again, Vegeta turned. Again, nothing.

"You'll have to turn faster than that!" the voice sounded from Vegeta's left. Vegeta twirled around.

"Boo!" the voice sounded from Vegeta's right. Vegeta turned to see only the infinite white void.

"Show yourself, impudent coward!" Vegeta howled in frustration, lifting his fists up, prepared to fight, "You dare taunt the Prince of All Saiyajins?"

"I'm sorry, I'm a bit hard of hearing," the voice sneered from behind Vegeta. Once more, Vegeta turned around to no avail. Casting his eyes back and forth, Vegeta searched wildly for the body to which the voice belonged. He felt a slight pressure over his head, as if something was pushing down on his flame-like hair.

An upside-down face belonging to a very small body crept into the top of Vegeta's vision. Slowly, it waxed further into sight.

It was a murky purple face, black to the careless glance, and was truly the epitome of hideousness. The cheeks (if one could call those angular points cheeks) were layered with a porous calcification that looked like pink coral. The nose was aquiline to the extreme, in so much that it looked sniveling and untrustworthy. The mouth seemed to be etched into a permanent smirk, though it was hard to tell as the mouth had no lips and all the triangular teeth were black and yellow and could hardly be seen as smile-worthy. Lastly, surrounding the face were two gawky ears and a bald, bony scalp.

After observing the face, Vegeta realized something. The blasted little imp was sitting on his head! He scowled blackly at the creature.

"You mentioned something about the Prince of what conquered-and-extinct race again? I didn't hear you," the creature said, smiling as much as he could.

"Worm!" the Prince screamed, grappling the upside-down creature by the throat and squeezing his hands tight until his knuckles went white. With a puff of smoke, the creature vanished out of Vegeta's grasp.

"Did you like the smoke? I did it myself!"

Vegeta swirled around to see the small creature. It barely reached his waist; Vegeta should have been able to break it with ease. Yet the thing stood there with its hands on its hips, completely unfazed. There were no markings on its scrawny throat.

"You may as well give up," it continued, "You can't kill a figment of your imagination!"

"What sorcery is this?" Vegeta growled, more to himself than to the little thing in front of him.

He narrowed his eyes on the creature and snapped, "Who are you, fiend?" The purple creature shook its head wearily, like a disappointed parent.

"Not _fiend_," it corrected, "_figment_!"

Enough. Vegeta shot out both hands forward, letting out a flashing blue blast. When the blinding light faded, there was nothing in sight but the white void. Vegeta snorted with satisfaction. Now, to return to his original purpose! Where was he?

"This…" he pondered, "this must be some level of Hell."

"Hell?" It was the voice of that purple imbecile. Vegeta twirled around and shot at it; the creature vanished and reappeared on Vegeta's shoulder. The Prince furiously swatted the thing away and threw another ki blast. Again, the thing simply vanished and then reappeared only a few yards away from where it was before.

"But Hell's for dead people!" the creature exclaimed.

"I am dead, fool!" Vegeta bellowed while hurling another futile blast, "You are some specter sent by the gods to torture me unto eternity with that repugnant face and that vile and shrill voice of yours!"

"Ouch!" the creature mocked, appearing on Vegeta's head again, "I feel like I've just been slapped by a thesaurus!"

Vegeta let out a hiss of vexation. He grasped the creature by the shoulders and tried to squash its bones into jelly. The creature disappeared once more.

"Are you done yet?" the creature spoke through a yawn. Its voice was coming from every direction now, and wherever Vegeta turned the thing was not to be found.

"I will not be done until you die, Worm!" Vegeta spat.

"Then this is gonna take a while," the voice still rang like an echo from every direction, "I can only die if you die, and since you can't die, well—then you're stuck with me!"

"What do you mean I can't die?" Vegeta harshly questioned, "I am dead!"

"That's what I'm here to talk about! But you haven't ceased blasting at me since you arrived."

Vegeta begrudgingly pulled down his fists and let them relax at his side. He tried to draw back his open snarl and replace it with his usual frown. He struggled to give out a pacifist appearance but failed miserably. However, the creature seemed to appreciate the effort, so it reappeared in front of Vegeta.

After a heavy silence, Vegeta gruffly said, "Alright, I'll stop—for now. But you must stop your ridiculous mind games!"

"Can't help you there," the purple thing shrugged, "seeing that I am part of your mind."

"Enough with your babble!" Vegeta charged, "Tell me where I am and who you are and what you mean by saying I cannot die!"

"Isn't it self-explanatory?" the thing yawned wide, displaying its rotting teeth and its odorous black tongue to the world, "You are in your dreams so—"

"Already you lie!" Vegeta flourished a fist, "I dream only in blackness and only ever of…" He saw a flash; it was the cruel white face of Freeza; the tyrant's lips arched amusedly as he tormented Vegeta, "I only ever dream of him."

"Maybe your dreams got bored of him. I mean he's not the most diverse character, if you know what I mean," for some reason, the creature spoke as if it knew intuitively what Vegeta had meant by 'him.'

"Your dreams scrapped him and instead made you imagine," the creature grinned proudly, "me!"

"Why in the hell would I imagine you?" Vegeta spoke in a matter-of-fact manner, grimacing with disgust, "You're hideous and detestable."

"Again with the slapping of the thesaurus!" the creature feigned a sniffle, "Maybe I'm what your sub-conscience really feels internally."

"There you go with your babble again," Vegeta roughly spoke, "I command you to be silent!"

"It was just a thought…"

"I said be silent!"

There was silence.

"Now," Vegeta went on, smirking at his petty victory, "tell me what you meant earlier about not dying."

Silence.

"Damn it!" Vegeta roared, "Speak!"

"But you told me not to!"

"That was then! This is now: speak before I destroy you!"

The creature broke out into gnawing laughter, remembering Vegeta's frustrated frown when every single blast he threw had missed the target. Once the creature bridled its laughter, though, it decided to play along.

"Fickle, fickle, aren't we?" it grumbled under its breath, then looking into Vegeta's dark glare, it spoke, "What I meant was that I'm your dream and dreams will always be dreamt so long as your sub-conscience is around. So the only way to get rid of me would be to get rid of your sub-conscience. You can only get rid of that if you die, and you can't die, so—"

"What do you mean?" Vegeta interrupted. The creature looked confused.

"Well," it hesitated, "er…you're immortal, of course. So how could you die?"

"My wish was granted?" Vegeta's eyes plummeted down toward the unseen platform on which he stood. He brooded to himself.

"Seeing that a hole was cut into your heart," the creature sarcastically remarked, "and you're still breathing, I'd have to guess…Duh!"

Enough. Vegeta heaved another ki blast at the insolent creature. The thing vanished from sight, and after awhile of complete still, Vegeta decided that the thing was gone for good.

"I'm immortal," he heard himself utter. He had gone to Namek with the express purpose of finding the Dragon Balls and becoming immortal. He had gained a swift and glorious success, which was encouraging after his failure on that weakling planet called Earth. More importantly, he had acquired immortality.

Vegeta's face glowed. Yes, he most assuredly saw that he was a god now. Nothing could defeat him. He was immortal. He would never suffer an ignoble defeat again, for he would always rise out of the sea of failure each time he was shot down, to seize pure, sweet triumph.

Triumph! All the universe would be a stranger to him. He would know only triumph, triumph, triumph! And all because he had got his wish, all because:

"I am immortal…" he wondered to himself. The snarl-like smile that made him seem like he was in a state of mystic worship spread across his face.

"I'm immortal. I'm not dead—" His smile went out like a candle and was suddenly replaced with a terrible scowl, "Wait, what?"

"I wasn't dying when I said all those damnable things to Kakarrot!" Vegeta's voice rose rapidly, "I gave him permission to steal my revenge from me—and I'm still alive!"

"And you wept like a baby, too!" the creature reappeared at Vegeta's side with a sadistic grin on its face, "You can kiss your hard-ass reputation good-bye!"

Vegeta felt the frothy madness arise inside him. He forgot about the joy he had felt a mere moment ago. He forgot about immortality. He could only think: Kakarrot.

Unthinkingly, he tossed a ki blast at the creature and looked above him, into the infinite white. Coming from the depth of his being, a weak growl slipped through his lips. It grew into a squeal, then quickly cracked and reassembled itself, bursting into a roar. Then the roar exploded into an enraged boom, so loud, so earth-shaking, no word could describe it.

"Damn you, Kakarrot!" the boom finally formed words that echoed into the white eternity. The void began to quake as the unrestrained wrath of the Saiyajin throbbed wildly. The void began to tumble into itself under the force of the quake, ousted by the nothingness it had swept away earlier.

"Wake up!" Vegeta commanded his body. He was asleep. He was dreaming. Yet he was still there on Namek. He could still become a Super Saiyajin, defeat Freeza, and then destroy that third-class ape if he only returned to consciousness.

"Wake up!"

The creature cringed beside Vegeta and pleaded, "What are you doing? Stop! You were still hurt! Your body needs sleep to heal itself! You'll wake up with a hole in your heart!"

"I'll be damned if that tailless excuse of a Saiyajin robs me of my honor, of my vengeance," Vegeta paled with horror, "of my birthright!"

"Wake up!" he boomed. The white void was nearly completely collapsed around him.

"Wake up!"

A/N: _Thank you for reading! Please share your input!_


	6. Chapter Five: A Man of Legend

Chapter Five: A Man of Legend

Awake. Vegeta tried to tear open his eyelids, but he felt a weight pressing atop them. In fact, he felt that same weight all over his body, as if a boa constrictor were intertwined around him. The weight, cold as steel, coiled around every curve of his body and slightly, ever so slightly squeezed.

He could not breathe. There was a strange matter gathered in his nostrils and in his mouth.

"Where the hell am I?" he thought to himself. A frigid slime grazed his cheek, and he felt his skin perk and shiver a bit. The slime wriggled further up until it met Vegeta's forehead. Dashing up his hand to his face, Vegeta squashed the worm into nothing but brown goo.

"What—a worm? On my face!" He then realized where he was. He was six feet under, suffocated on every side with cold earth. Rage poured through his veins. He sprung out of the ground; the dirt splattered outward, disintegrating against the heat of his ki.

"Who put me here?" he savagely shouted, "Who! I will see his innards sprawled out across the dirt!" Vegeta found himself a bit disappointed when he realized his rather imaginative threat fell upon no ears but his own. No one was there.

A cliff loomed over his shoulders. The flat top of a sweeping mesa stretched out in front of him with tufts of green scattered here and there. Snorting and coughing out the dirt in his lungs and airways, Vegeta narrowed his eyes. A crust of dirt flaked off of his eyelashes, and he suddenly saw more clearly. Still, though, there was no one.

Vegeta growled. He brought a grimy fist up to wipe the dirt off his cheek, but that only spread the cool, brown earth all across the side of his face. Vegeta growled more loudly. Where was everyone? He tossed his eyes to and fro and found nothing and no one.

"Genki Dama?" he heard a deep voice vibrate from behind and to his left.

"It's one of Kaiosama's techniques! A desperation attack! We form an energy ball with that of every living thing of the planet. Animals, plants, us…"

It was that damned cue ball head speaking! Vegeta twirled around toward the voices. He first noticed not the three figures lurking over the edge of the cliff about twenty yards away from him. He noticed the humongous orb, at least three hundred feet in diameter, glowing high on the top of the hemisphere. It was simply radiating with the energy of entire planets.

Vegeta felt dwarfed beneath its power, growing larger still. He watched as swirls of light skid across the sky to absorb into the orb of strength. He was roused out of his awe by the voice of Kakarrot's stuttering brat.

"B-but," the boy stammered to Kuririn beside him, "will it work on Freeza?"

"He's collecting the energy from all the planets around here. It might be enough to destroy this whole planet, but he's got to try it. If he doesn't beat Freeza with this attack, the entire universe is in danger," the bald man replied while peering over the cliff as if an intriguing scene lay hidden there that Vegeta could not see from his position.

Vegeta heard the sound of a hard kick and then an even harder slam. Gohan winced as he watched Freeza kick his father to the ground.

"He found out," Kuririn pessimistically muttered.

Piccolo rabidly shook his head, shouting, "No! He hasn't. Both of you, give me your remaining energy," Gohan and Kuririn leered at Piccolo suspiciously, "Give it to me now!" A white-blue light flashed in the sky as Freeza threw a mighty blast at Goku, hurling the Saiyajin into the water with a splash.

Kuririn and Gohan laid their hands on Piccolo's broad green shoulders, usually cloaked in a white turban but now bared and freed from the weight in preparation for battle. The two Earthlings sealed their eyes shut in concentration as their energy soaked into the Namek, slowly and thoroughly, like a sponge.

While the others concentrated, Vegeta pulled his feet forward, dragging himself toward the edge of the cliff. He felt a coldness pinch and pierce inside his chest. A heavy pain squeezed and twisted in place, and a sudden weakness overwhelmed him so that his knees began to buckle. Looking down, he saw that his battle jacket was completely drenched with a black crust of blood while bright claret pumped vigorously out of a hole on the left side of his chest.

Studying the hole further, Vegeta realized that the blasted purple imp was right. He did not allow himself enough time to heal and was now walking around with a hole in his heart. Already, he could sense his consciousness leaving him in a white blur. He shook his head back and forth, forcing the blur away as he stumbled forward a pace.

Vegeta slipped out of his senses. His smell, taste, and touch went immediately numb, and he wobbled toward the three warriors on the cliff while his sight faded in and out.

"Enough!" he heard a soft echo of a voice reverberate through his ears. It seemed to be coming from the green man.

"Keep a little energy for yourselves!" the green man seemed to say, though Vegeta was fast losing his ability to distinguish between sound and sight. He suspected that no one was speaking at all, and it was merely that damned imp inside his head that was jabbering.

Vegeta had managed to lug himself forward so that he was now only a few feet behind Gohan, Piccolo, and Kuririn. They did not notice him, however, as his ki was but a flickering tongue of fire, faint and weak. Furthermore, their concentration was engrossed by the scene unfolding beneath them.

Below was a wide circular valley of orange rock dropping at one side, where ocean crept over the earth, blending together to make a murky, mahogany tide. Canyons were freshly carved across the valley in zigzag shapes—it was proof of the fight that had unraveled between Goku and Freeza.

"He's caught on," Piccolo gravely stated, watching as Freeza gawked furiously at the Genki Dama above.

Turning to Gohan and Kuririn, Piccolo commanded, "Don't move. Whatever happens, don't get involved!"

Goku suddenly dragged himself out of the ocean, and wearily tossed a punch at Freeza's face. The tyrant caught it easily, and with one finger was about to explode a spear of energy through his prey's eye when Piccolo flung forward and kicked the tyrant forcefully into the water.

As the green man raised Goku to his feet to prepare the Genki Dama further, Vegeta summoned forth his frothy madness. Within him dwelt a roaring dragon of rage. It screamed and tore at his insides and made him forget his blinding pain in an instant. The fading consciousness snapped out of existence and instead a clear concentrated hate seized the Prince's being.

He saw his target. He saw Kakarrot. He must kill Kakarrot. His heart beat faster, faster; more and more blood flowed out of his chest, leaking onto his battle jacket. His face paled with the loss of blood, but the adrenaline of his rage kept the claret pumping, kept the veins swelling and the muscles flexing with tension, kept the eyes bulging with the escalating desire to explode with fury. The small, failing ki the Prince had had, burst without warning. It was as if a bucket of oil was tossed onto a weak flame, transforming it into a hungry wildfire.

Freeza flew out of the ocean, intent on tackling Goku, but Piccolo threw a ki blast forward, distracting the tyrant. Meanwhile, Goku reached out both of his arms toward the heavens. The massive orb of power, Genki Dama, began to hurtle down toward the planet.

Vegeta saw his target. He saw Freeza. He screamed. Gohan and Kuririn wheeled around and curdled at the sight of the Saiyajin Prince—mud and blood matting his hair, his face, his entire body.

"That's my kill!" Vegeta spat, crimson foam bubbling out of his mouth, "Damn you, Kakarrot! You will not steal my kill!"

Vegeta darted off of the cliff, into the battle scene. Goku had his eyes closed, his arms raised, and all the while the Genki Dama came hurtling downwards. Piccolo bound around the valley like a deer in flight, evading Freeza's powerful blasts. Focused on the Namek, Freeza had his back to Vegeta when suddenly the tyrant felt two steel arms slip through the crook of his armpits, wrap around his shoulders and then grip together behind his head.

Vegeta had grappled onto Freeza and held the beast in place while the Genki Dama tumbled over them, inching closer and closer.

"Ha ha! Worm, is that a glint of fear I see in you?" Vegeta both hissed and laughed into Freeza's ear.

"You! Ape! You're dead!" Freeza ranted in confusion. Vegeta sneered disdainfully, squeezing his grip tighter as Freeza floundered.

"You can never kill me," Vegeta said bitingly, "You can never kill the Super Saiyajin."

"Do it, Goku!" Piccolo yelled, flying to safety, "Vegeta's got him pinned! Take him out—now!"

Freeza's pupils shrunk, smaller than peas, as the blinding white orb of power poured into sight, falling closer.

"Shit!" Freeza cursed wildly, squirming in Vegeta's leaden grip, "Let go of me, you crazy ape!" Everyone around the two darted into hiding as the Genki Dama neared its target.

"No! No!" Freeza yelped, "Let go!"

Hysterical laughter overflowed out of Vegeta's mouth, coupled with the bloody foam of his madness. He laughed and laughed until his side began to hurt and tears seeped out of the corners of his eyes.

"How does it feel, lizard-man?" he managed to spit out to his long-time torturer, the object of all his detestation and rage, "How does it feel to die?"

Then it all went white. The orb of power collapsed clumsily into the ground. Rock and dust and water burst, disintegrated and shattered here and there. There was a long rumbling and the sound of an immense crash.

Once the overall shaking of the senses subsided, Gohan peaked up his head from his hiding place. He saw that the orb had eaten at the surface of the planet until it dug into place a gaping, black hole, nearly three hundred feet deep. He was not able to see the bottom of it. He merely studied the scene in awe, letting his mouth drop shamelessly.

Not long after Gohan jumped to his feet, he saw Kuririn run to his side. Both of them stood solemnly and silently for a moment, examining the abandoned valley beneath them.

"I hope Piccolo and Dad weren't hit," Gohan mumbled, "I can't feel their ki's."

"That's because you don't have enough energy left to concentrate," Kuririn assured his friend, "Piccolo was always lucky. I'm sure they're alive…except for Vegeta, of course. Don't know how he managed to be suddenly alive still, but there's no way he could have survived that blast head-on. Unless…" Kuririn jolted his head up in realization, "of course…the wish!"

"Kuririn!" Gohan shouted excitedly, flinging an index finger forward. He pointed at the shore of the ocean where two small dots could be seen dragging themselves out of the water.

"They're alive!" Gohan smiled. Kuririn and he flew toward the two dots as fast as they could, which was not very fast as they were practically zapped of all their energy.

Landing their feet softly on the ground, the two helped Piccolo and Goku to their feet. Gohan jumped on his father and hugged Goku tightly. Piccolo let a small smirk creep onto his face. They all of them together sighed with relief.

"Good," Piccolo heaved out, "Let's go home."

"With my ship," Goku spoke weakly as Kuririn helped him walk forward and as Gohan helped Piccolo walk forward, their backs to the battle scene, "it'll take us only five days to get back home."

Kuririn halted and yelped girlishly, his face going white.

"What?" Goku looked down at his friend.

"I almost forgot!" Kuririn shouted, "Bulma!"

Goku chuckled with relief, "You scared me! I thought Freeza was back for a second!"

Kuririn rubbed the back of his head nervously, unwittingly polishing it under the Namek sun, and said, "Somehow…Bulma is worse!"

Goku cringed with pain as he burst into laughter, "Don't make me laugh! It hurts!" All of them staggered together away from the valley. The further they progressed, the wider their smiles became. They at last felt that their deed was done.

Piccolo scanned the scarred surface of the planet and felt Nail, the Namek-seijin he absorbed, shudder inside him. He could not help but let Nail speak through him.

"It's been a real disaster for Namek, but…" he looked around pensively as Gohan helped him forward, "all those who died can now rest in peace with the Head Namek."

"Huh?" Kuririn paused to glance at Piccolo, "How do you know about the Head Namek?"

Before Piccolo could respond, a loud clap of what seemed to be thunder shot into the air. From the bottom of the hole the Genki Dama made, a beam of light flew upward. A blackened and crisped body flung high into the sky and then hurtled down, landing noisily in front of Goku and the others.

At first glance, it appeared to be a charred carcass, as it was covered with black ash from head to toe. Though, when one probed it more carefully, the stout but muscular body and the flame-like Saiyajin hair revealed that the burnt thing in front of them was a limp and unconscious Vegeta.

Everyone froze where they were, trying to compute what had happened. Piccolo was the first to realize it. Turning around, he saw Freeza, bruised and tousled, pull out of the hole with an infuriated grimace distorting his face. The tyrant lifted two fingers. Piccolo instinctively knew what was about to happen. He leapt out of Gohan's grip and let a pulse of his ki push his friends out of the way.

"Piccolo!" he heard a voice shout as Freeza's beam of energy shot through his right shoulder. He collapsed onto the ground, unconscious. Gohan and Kuririn immediately ran to the Namek and kneeled down to tend to the wound.

"You and that Monkey Prince scared me for a second," Freeza haughtily announced, "I thought I would die!"

Bounding to his feet, Goku turned to his son and Kuririn.

"Get out of here!" he ordered, "Take my ship and leave the planet with Bulma!"

"What are you saying?" Kuririn rose to his feet in disbelief, "You nuts, Goku? We can't!"

"Leave right now!" Goku persisted, "You're in my way! Do you want to die, too?" Kuririn saw the gravity chiseled in his friend's features and bent over to pick up Piccolo so that he could leave with Gohan.

Freeza had other plans.

"If you think you'll get away that easy, guess again!" He snickered, "Even hurt, I will easily kill you all!" He lifted his right hand into the air, tensing every single finger. Suddenly, Kuririn found himself being elevated, in unison with the movement of Freeza's hand.

"Freeza!" Goku screamed in horror, "Stop!"

"G-Goku!" Kuririn shouted in fear, looking straight into his friend's eyes as Freeza clenched his hand into a fist, exploding Kuririn into oblivion. Once the dust of the explosion blew away, there was not even a single trace of the bald man's existence remaining. Freeza grinned with poisonous satisfaction.

"Your turn, worm!" Freeza said, turning to Gohan who was ducking behind Piccolo's unconscious body.

"You!" Goku shouted, distracting Freeza from his targeted prey.

"You!" Goku shouted again. His rage was so wild, he could feel only its animal hate boil inside him. He nearly forgot how to speak as his anger fumed into an exponential explosion of power.

"You will pay!" he managed to scream, "H-how…how dare you?" A yellow light burst around him as his wrath teemed out of his being. That was the last straw. The time had come. He had to kill Freeza.

Much to Vegeta's annoyance, it was not all black this time. It was again all white. He was sitting in vexation on the invisible platform, his legs crossed and his chin resting petulantly on his palms. As always in his dreams, he had his tail again, and oh how it thrashed! If one could not see its obvious connection to the Saiyajin's spine, one would think the tail to be some gargantuan, writhing worm.

"How many damned times will I be knocked-out on this damned planet?" Vegeta howled with frustration. This had become routine now, and he was expecting the dark purple imp to appear out of nowhere any moment now. Indeed, it did. It appeared right atop the Prince's head with a mocking sneer stretched across its hideous features.

"Back already? That was quick!" it derided, "And what did you learn today, Monkey?" Vegeta growled so forcefully his ribcage rattled. He grappled the imp and threw it off his head.

"I learned," he barked as the thing sat in front of him, crossed its legs and rested its chin on its palms in a mirror image of Vegeta, "that there may just be something more obnoxious than Freeza and Kakarrot combined, namely _you_!"

"_You _are more obnoxious than Freeza and Kakarrot combined?" the imp raised its brows in surprise, "That's pretty low!"

"Not _me_, imbecile, _you_!" Vegeta rejoined.

"I didn't say me, and I did say you," the imp stated, "And I've got to say you are definitely improving in the ego area if you've finally come to terms with how much of an a—"

The imp, like a snap of a finger, disappeared as Vegeta hurled a bright, white-blue ki blast forward. After a moment of silence, Vegeta brooding to himself in annoyance, the imp reappeared in the same position as before, mirroring the Prince.

"I thought we decided to cut that out?" the imp spat.

"Shut up," Vegeta calmly charged while leaping to his feet, "I need to get out of here!"

The imp continued the mirror image, jumping to its feet and crossing its arms in Vegeta's characteristic fashion.

"What?" it questioned, "But look what happened last time you woke yourself up before you had a chance to heal! You were so weak, you were disoriented, and the only thing you could think to do was to jump on that guy's back and hold him in place while someone else's move took both of you out."

Vegeta grunted, averting his eyes to his left and staring into the white infinity. The imp copied him, arching its lips in a semblance of a smirk.

"Well," Vegeta grated after a while, "it worked, didn't it?"

"Did it?"

"It did work!" Vegeta yelled, bringing his fists to his side while his eyes smoldered over the creature, "I will not have a dead man—for that's what Kakarrot shall be once I'm done with him—I will not have him steal my vengeance from me, now that I'm…" Vegeta's voice faded, and he looked down thoughtfully. The imp continued to parrot the Saiyajin's every movement, and then finished Vegeta's thoughts.

"Now that you're immortal?" it proposed. Vegeta nodded faintly.

"So," the imp piped, "how're you liking that so far?"

His eyes still roaming in thought, Vegeta mechanically processed the words and then spat out, unenthused, "Why the hell should I tell you? Didn't you yourself say you were a figment of my imagination?"

"Indeed, I did!" the imp replied, "Which is why it shouldn't matter whether or not you tell me."

"Which is why you shouldn't care if I choose not to tell you," Vegeta hissed. There was a quiet that seemed more like a waiting period than an awkward silence.

Vegeta mustered his thoughts together and wondered aloud, "I didn't feel any different. When I woke up, I felt the same as I did when I was still mortal."

"You did, though, feel the hole in your heart?" the imp asked and received a grunt for an affirmation, "But you could still breathe and move?" another positive grunt, "Then, actually, yes, you did feel different!" the imp placed its hands on its hips proudly, "You felt very much alive, whereas anyone else would have felt," he paused, stroking his chin, "well, very much…dead."

Vegeta was still lost in thought, but he had managed to hear the imp's words.

"But I haven't grown any stronger beside the usual increase after serious injury…" his voice trailed off.

"Your wish wasn't for strength or omnipotence."

"I know perfectly well what I wished for, fool!" Vegeta snapped. He seemed jolted back into reality. His eyes were as full of vibrating hate as ever.

He glared down at the imp with oozing distaste as the creature responded, "Then stop doubting yourself."

"I think," Vegeta crossed his arms in resolution, "I think I will sleep. I haven't had a truly good sleep in…"

He recalled his tender youth on Planet Vegeta, how no one would ever have dared to pester his precious slumber. He recalled his days with Freeza, how the tyrant made sure to never let the Prince sleep uninterrupted for more than forty minutes. He recalled his days purging weakling planets, how even with the simplicity of his missions he had never had the chance to really, truly sleep.

"I haven't truly slept in a long while. And I don't want to wake up again in so deplorable a state. Now that Freeza's defeated, I suppose I can wait till my body recovers," he looked upward in determination, "and then I can begin my training."

The imp looked up, mirroring Vegeta.

"Training?" it squawked, "For what?"

Vegeta closed his eyes and sighed, "For my birthright, for my destiny. I am the Legendary," his breathing slowed down, "I am the strongest warrior this universe has ever known and will ever know. And I will make sure that they realize this."

The imp stopped copying the Prince.

"Who're they?" it asked, staring into the Prince's face.

"They?" Vegeta echoed, his eyes still closed.

After a moment of nothing but deep breaths, he replied, "They are everyone." Then he fell into a black and dreamless sleep.

It was the round, blue face of Kaiosama. Beads of sweat trickled down his forehead and poured over his plump cheeks. Kaiosama stooped over a crystal ball, watching the fate of the universe as three deceased Earthlings, Yamcha, Chaozu, and Tien, loitered impatiently behind him.

"I'm not completely sure what will happen, but we've got to try," Kaiosama spoke aloud, though to no one near him, "You say Mr. Popo has gathered all the Dragon Balls on Earth? Are you certain?"

"Yes," the voice of Kami said in reply. Kaiosama continued, "I was hoping that the Head Namek had died before Vegeta got his wish, so that we could simply resurrect the Nameks and have them use the last wish of their Dragon Balls to transport themselves to safety. But that is not the case. Vegeta got his wish."

Kami's voice rang through Kaiosama's mind, "Then we only have one wish to accomplish everything we need done?"

"Unfortunately."

"Then," Kami encouragingly suggested, "come up with one elaborate sentence to tell Shenron, so that we can get it all in one!"

"Yes, of course! Let me think...Yamcha! Chaozu! Tien! Got any ideas?" The blue man charged while turning to the Earthlings. They looked between each other and proposed different prepositional phrases and sentences until—

"Perfect!" Kaiosama shouted, "We've got it, Kami-sama! Tell Shenron these words exactly: After having resurrected all those that Freeza and his goons killed, please transport everyone on Namek to Earth except for Freeza!

"Do it quickly, Kami-sama! Namek will blow up!"

"I'll see that Mr. Popo does it immediately."

The heights of Namek were palled with dark clouds that on occasion flashed broodingly as the two Titans of power shuttled their immense blasts back and forth between each other. Yet now, the clouds twirled in their black mood without disruption. Instead, it was the ocean that suffered. It tossed up and down, nervously, as the ki lurking at the bed of the ocean pulsated in slumber.

Goku had sent Gohan and Piccolo away from the battle. After nearly half an hour of pounding on Freeza, he finally received a hit that threw him to the bottom of the ocean. The move had not hurt him—he had far exceeded Freeza's capabilities at this point in time—but it had rattled him enough. When his head slammed into the ground, he passed out for a moment.

The Saiyajin raised on Earth lay in a sweet sleep on the bottom of the ocean. The rage that had captured every ounce of his being disappeared for a moment, and he felt his childlike innocence return to him.

In his dream, he opened his eyes. He was still lying on the bottom of the ocean, but he could breathe easily and could see through the murky water as if it were crystal clear. Looming over him was the pointed, green face of the Dragon Shenron.

"Shenron?" Goku yawned happily, "Wow, is that you? You're getting older!"

The Dragon floated above the Saiyajin in the water, its sinuous body wriggling out of ken.

"What're you doing here?" Goku asked, remaining in place on the ground, "I must be dead!"

"No, Legendary," the solemn voice of Shenron rumbled, "thou livest. Thou art asleep and shall soon wake."

"Oh, yeah? Great!" Goku flaunted his fists and feet in the air in a victory dance, though he remained prostrate, "I can finish Freeza off now!"

"Legendary," Shenron thundered impassively, "thy battle cannot be finished. It is the wish of thy friends on Earth that thou and all those on Namek be transported to Earth."

"That's nice of them, but…" Goku hesitated in thought, "I'm fine staying on Namek. I want to defeat Freeza!"

The Dragon replied, "Thou refusest the will of the Eternal Dragon?"

"Refuse?" Goku waved his hands in the air nervously, "No, no! Please understand! I just can't be taken right now. I'm in the middle of something! Tell them thanks but no thanks. Anyways, if you didn't want to be refused, why'd you even ask me," he chuckled lightly, "I mean, with all due respect?"

The Dragon solemnly answered, "The Legendary holdeth the potential for deeper powers than could ever be known. His will must also be respected."

"Then, please, I'm begging you, respect it," Goku said, "Just because you aren't taking me to Earth, doesn't mean you can't fulfill the rest of the wish!"

The eyes of the Dragon flashed with a profound red.

Then it spoke with the wisdom of ages, "So be it. After having resurrected those killed by Freeza and his subordinates, I have transported those on Namek to Earth—except for thou, the Legendary, who hath refused."

"Thanks!" Goku smiled wide as the Dragon swam away, wiggling its body to and fro. In a moment, Goku woke up. He felt his body fill with ineffable anger once again. His whole body flashed with rage, turning his hair gold and his eyes a cutting sea green. His energy formed a cocoon of burning light around him. He was prepared for battle.

Jumping up, Goku plummeted out of the sea. It was time to defeat Freeza.

**A/N: **_Hi, Luke! Thanks for your enthusiasm and support! In answer to your question, I would have to say that I am writing this on the basis of the canon of the manga—not the show, not the movies. In which case, Garlic Jr. does not exist, and there is nothing to say that Vegeta would resurrect immediately._

_Also, I am assuming that in comparison Garlic, Jr. was stronger and thus healed more quickly than this early Vegeta who has yet to reach Super Saiyajin level. Furthermore, since I am ignoring the movies, I suppose you could just say I am taking a bit of liberty as I think it is both more realistic and more dramatic to take my approach._

_Thank you everyone for reading! Please review!_


	7. Chapter Six: Atypical & Confrontational

Chapter Six: Atypical and Confrontational

Vegeta stirred, rustling the clean white sheet draped over his body. Peeling his lids open, he saw above him a lime-green ceiling dotted with a field of innumerable black specks. Groggy from the length of his sleep, Vegeta stared forward unthinkingly. After a while, he tried to force himself into full wakefulness. Instead, he gained just enough grasp of his surroundings to notice those black specks on the ceiling.

"One, two…" he began to count. He arrived at "thirty-seven" when consciousness hit him like a train. He tossed the white sheet off his body while bounding onto the floor. The cold of pseudo-marble tiles stung his bare feet. He did not bother to question why he was unshod; he did not bother to question where the hole in his heart and chest had gone or why he was dressed in a sky-blue hospital smock.

All he could do was pace forward, backward, forward, backward in a circuit of five square feet of floor. He was trying to piece together all his disjointed thoughts, dreams, and emotions so as to make some sense of them. His conclusion:

He did not know how he would manage it, but somehow—he was determined that somehow he would keep himself from ever having to sleep again. Sure, that may sound unreasonable at first, but it was nothing compared to how unreasonable it was for the Prince of All Saiyajins to have been coerced into unconsciousness three times in a single day!

"What the f—" Vegeta stammered harshly. He froze in place and examined his reflection in a small rectangular mirror, hung neatly over a sanitized hospital sink.

"Where in the hell is my armor?" the Prince bellowed, looking down at his chest and yanking at the bottom corners of the smock disdainfully, "What in the hell am I wearing?"

The volume of Vegeta's voice escalated as he continued to pour out expletives. He scuffed his eyes over every piece of furniture and every medicinal instrument with disgust while stomping around the room. Seizing a tray of Earthling food on a table at the foot of the bed, he hurtled it into the walls.

Hearing the commotion, a nurse entered the room only to have to leap right out again, using the door as a shield against a flowerpot.

"S-sir?" she peeked her eyes over the edge of the door to glance into the room. Vegeta stood, glued in place, panting with anger. Fortunately, he seemed too lost in thought to throw anything.

Ever since Vegeta fought that third-class ape on Earth, his judgment had been clouded with emotions and frustrations. Even now, as he chided himself for his imprudence, he felt the anger brewing inside him. Like puss in an old sore, his anger putrefied and then, turning gangrenous, spread like a fever through his body.

Vegeta told himself that he was losing control, but the truth was that he had already lost it. When that damned Kakarrot beat him, all control had gone amok. He had only his willpower left to act as a source of discipline.

As a warrior, this was insufferable, but Vegeta supposed that will alone was enough. He recalled Nappa telling him an old Saiyajin proverb when he was a boy:

"Few are born brave, yet all can make themselves so through training. The heart of training is discipline. And the heart of discipline is will."

If a warrior has the upper hand in morale, he needn't fear a thing. How could Vegeta not have morale? He was the Prince of All Saiyajins! He was the strongest warrior in the universe! He—not Kakarrot— defeated Freeza (he saw so himself)!

Above all, a warrior can lack courage because he fears death, but the Prince already knew that he never had to worry about that.

"Sir," the nurse repeated with more confidence as Vegeta thought to himself in silence. Once she noticed that she caught his attention, she stepped half-way into the room

"Is—is there something…wrong?" she asked.

"Must you be both a woman and an idiot? Is it even possible to be that damned inferior?" Vegeta barked, tossing up two fiery black eyes at the servant-woman in front of him, "Is something wrong? What's wrong is that a damned coward has stolen my armor and dressed me in this peasant-rag! What fool has dared to dishonor me?"

"I, um—uh…" the nurse shrank more and more as Vegeta's voice boomed louder and louder. She decided to shirk the whole dilemma. Leaning her shoulder toward the doorway, she motioned with a point of her finger that she was leaving.

"I'll—go check on that for you, sir," she improvised and then nearly sprang out of the room, closing the door behind her. She sprinted down the hall and exhaustedly slammed her hands on the hospital's front desk.

Across the desk were inscribed imposing, black letters: "CAPSULE CORP CLINIC".

"Hey, buzz in Dr. Ogawa," the nurse huffed to the receptionist sitting behind the desk. The receptionist cast the nurse an inquisitive glance while dialing the doctor's pager on the phone. After that was done, she hung up the receiver and leaned toward the nurse, ready for the latest gossip. The nurse leaned forward, too.

"You know that patient Miss Briefs gave us—" the nurse started.

"One of those creepy green guys?" the receptionist mewed in a voice befitting her porcelain-doll face.

"No," the nurse shook her head and explained, "I mean that burn victim whose body somehow just healed itself. You know, the one Miss Briefs called a mini-conference over in order to warn us about his 'atypical and confrontational behavior?'"

"Oh!" the receptionist chirped in an epiphany, "You mean that cute soldier with the funky hair?"

"Cute? Ha!" the nurse spat, waving a hand dismissively, "He's up now. And Miss Briefs was right. He may be nice to look at, but he sure as hell isn't nice to be with! Atypical and confrontational my butt! He's just a jack a—"

"Yes, Mimi?" a tall, lean doctor—lab-coat, stethoscope and all— walked over to the front desk, looking down at the receptionist.

"Oh, Dr. Ogawa," the nurse exclaimed, "I had her call you over here. You know that burn victim Miss Briefs warned us about?" Dr. Ogawa nodded slowly. While he did this, one of the doors in the hallway exploded off its hinges and slammed into the wall opposite it.

Dr. Ogawa twirled around to the see the door fall onto the floor with a crash, leaving behind a rectangular dent in the wall.

"Well, the patient's up now," the nurse spoke to Dr. Ogawa's back, "And he's not very pleasant."

"How did Miss Briefs describe him again?" Dr. Ogawa muttered. He did not bother to glance back at the nurse but instead kept his eyes hooked on the mess in the hall.

"Atypical and confrontational," the nurse answered mechanically, placing her hands on her hips.

"What exactly did she mean by that?" the doctor wondered.

"She meant," the nurse spoke as a short, dark figure strode out of a patient's room, "violent."

"Is that him?" Vegeta shouted, pointing at the doctor accusingly while marching down the hall, toward the front desk, "Is this the fool that stole my armor?" He tossed his glance to the nurse.

"S-sir," the nurse began, "this is Dr. Ogawa. He didn't steal your…armor."

"Do you mean the clothes you were wearing when you first arrived?" the doctor enquired. Vegeta grunted affirmatively, crossing his arms.

The doctor felt the hard and muscular Saiyajin loom over him—even when the man was nearly a head-and-a-half taller than the Prince. The glaring patient sent shivers up the doctor's spine. Vegeta's blue smock ruffled in a draft from the air conditioner; still, he stood fixed in place, with eyes digging deep into the intimidated doctor.

"I believe that your clo—your 'armor' was removed so that the nurses could more easily dress your wounds," said Dr. Ogawa.

"What wounds?" Vegeta hissed, "I am in complete health."

"Well, yes, I can see that now. But your clothes were removed before your body decided to—er…heal itself."

"Enough!" Vegeta vanished from sight and then appeared centimeters from the doctor in an instant. The Prince grappled the doctor's shirt collar and heaved hot breaths onto the man's face.

"Where did you put my armor, thief?" Vegeta spoke lowly and tried to speak slowly, yet there was a hurried and almost menacing bend to his voice, "Speak now."

"I—" the doctor stammered, subtly glancing toward the receptionist, who snuck her fingers onto a red button hidden under the desk. Vegeta grasped the doctor's face and forced the man to look straight into his charcoal eyes.

"Where did you put it?" Vegeta whispered.

"I believe," the doctor roved his eyes around in thought, "Miss Briefs! Yes! We were going to dispose of it as it was damaged and contaminated with unhygienic fluids, but Miss Briefs said she would sanitize it. She took it to her headquarters, I think."

"You _think_?"

"I _know_ she has your cl—armor at her place," the doctor said with more conviction.

"Very well," Vegeta released the doctor and stepped back, "Take me there. I want my armor back now."

"But," the doctor stalled, "it's my shift right now. Someone has to watch over the—"

"Would you rather I kill you and take your clothes instead?" Vegeta threatened in an incongruously sweet tone. Dr. Ogawa stared at the Prince a moment and then shook his head carefully.

"Follow me," he said, leading the Prince out of the clinic. As he did this, he glanced again at the receptionist, and the woman faintly nodded to him. Opening the glass doors, the doctor and the Prince stepped out into the sprawling yet crowded atmosphere of Earth.

**A/N: **_Thanks for reading! Please review!_


	8. Chapter Seven: When Aliens Attack

Chapter Seven: When Aliens Attack

Being a warrior, Vegeta had mastered a number of skills in order to survive. Before Planet Vegeta's destruction, Nappa had already taught the Prince how to live in the wilderness using only the resources available. This in turn necessitated that the boy-prince be familiar with the basic flora and fauna of all the major planets.

Among other things, Vegeta had learned one very subtle trick at the age of twelve, to help him with his boasts. Naturally, Vegeta always made sure to vaunt of his accomplishments to Freeza's men. Since, though, he had so many assignments, he often confused planets with one another and hyperbolized his deeds. As a result, he earned himself the reputation of an exaggerated braggart.

One day after a routine purge, Nappa and Raditz advised their prince to add one small step to his procedure when arriving on a new planet.

"An old Saiyajin gave me a tip once that I think you could use, my Prince. He said that the first thing you should do when you step out of your pod is take note of the tint of the atmosphere," Raditz suggested with a modest tone, lowering his head to the boy-prince in reverence, "Then no matter what foul play the enemy might use, you will always know what planet you are on if you can see the atmosphere."

"That's the gibberish of a third-class weakling," the boy-prince recited. That was his habitual response to everything Radditz had to say.

"A damned weak weakling that's pretty damned weak is more like it!" Nappa boomed out of his hefty jaw.

"Thank you, Nappa, for that. I would never have realized it myself," the boy-prince shot back sarcastically, making the bald oaf blush to the tip of his scalp.

"Anyways," Nappa continued, "The weakling's still got a point. That's an old trick that every warrior should use. And it'll help you sort out which deed belongs to which planet. When making your boasts, all you'll need to remember in order to tell which planet you were on at the time of your exploits is the color of the sky."

From then on, the first thing Vegeta did when he stepped onto a new planet was glance up at the sky. And so, when Vegeta tread out of the hospital and saw the cerulean blanket sweeping high over his head as far as the eye could see, he remembered the color. He knew.

"Earth," he grumbled to himself, following the doctor onto the pavement. Well, that at least answered one of the questions that had bombarded his thoughts since he woke in the clinic.

Dr. Ogawa trailed further into the open. He stepped onto a pale sidewalk that wound around the grey walls of the hospital into a complex of numerous dome-shaped buildings. The buildings circled around one much larger dome with black-and-white stripes.

As the doctor led Vegeta closer to the largest dome, the Prince saw an insignia plastered over the entrance, similar to a copyright symbol. He was trying to remember where he had seen that insignia before when three noisy, white cars screeched up to the sidewalk, encircling him and the doctor.

The cars rang loudly and had lights on top of them that flashed a blinding red and blue. Their doors read "CAPSULE CORP SECURITY".

"Do not run! Stay where you are and put your hands in the air where we can see them!" a siren blared from one of the cars. Vegeta threw a glare at the doctor, who shrugged in feigned ignorance. Men jumped out of the cars armed with guns and bullet-proof vests, using the car doors as shields and the rolled-down windows as peepholes.

"Put your hands in the air where we can see them!" the siren repeated. A small crowd of employees swarmed out of the clinic. The mob of onlookers was led by the porcelain-faced receptionist who had sent the security guards after Dr. Ogawa and what she described as "Dr. Ogawa's kidnapper." Many of the guards tried to drive the onlookers away from the scene but failed terribly. Soon a mass hovered in front of the clinic, watching Vegeta from afar as if he were a villain in a movie.

Again, the siren forcefully repeated its command. The doctor slowly raised his hands onto his head. Vegeta lifted a brow, intrigued by this strange Earthling custom. He thought that perhaps these heavily armed men with their transportation vehicles might be some sort of police force, but then he chuckled silently to himself. All their ki's were so weak, it was laughable!

Like a cat with its wounded prey, Vegeta decided to amuse himself. After the siren gave him one last warning, he raised his hands into the air with a cruel smirk.

"Is it time to play already?" he rasped breathily, clenching his hands into tight fists until white-blue orbs of energy encased them.

Several armed men marched out from behind their wall of car doors and cautiously approached the scene. Two of them quickly escorted the doctor to safety, and the others, brandishing their guns, tread softly around the Prince. Vegeta stood still, his arms in the air, as the men surrounded him like a pack of wolves around a wounded doe.

Unfortunately for the security guards, Vegeta was no doe. As the men moved in closer and closer, he felt his smirk ripping broadly across his face. The orbs of energy around his hands dimmed a little, so as to escape the guards' notice.

"Not yet," Vegeta thought to himself as one man took a step closer, slinging his gun over a shoulder by its strap. The orbs of ki pulsed in excitement.

"Not yet…" Vegeta banished his eagerness as he felt the orbs flicker and steadily rise in energy. His power was rearing back like a cobra, ready to strike. The man stepped further forward and, pulling out a pair of handcuffs, reached out his hands toward Vegeta's.

"Almost there, almost there!" Vegeta's smirk became fuller when the guard placed his hands on Vegeta's to clasp on the handcuffs.

An agonized scream whipped out of the guard's throat. It sounded at first like the dissonant howls of a pack of hyenas but then collapsed from sheer exhaustion into a sobbing moan and then a muted whimper. The guard yanked away from Vegeta and pulled what was left of two convulsing hands toward his chest. The orbs of ki had, with their overwhelming heat, melted the handcuffs into the guard's hands and completely ate away the flesh and muscles, revealing bare, brittle bones.

"Bang!" Vegeta shouted. He looked like a boy in a playground as he playfully stretched out his arms in opposite directions. He shot a ki blast with his right hand, exploding the circle of guards around him into a crimson sludge; he shot a ki blast with his left hand, and all the cars that had surrounded him burst into the sky and then, swallowed by flames, crashed onto some unwary spectators in front of the clinic.

The mob of onlookers fell into a wave of screams as they all together fled into the hospital for cover.

Vegeta knew how futile it was to delight in the death of ants, but he was overwhelmed with excitement. Not excitement at the crashing and the screaming, of course, as those sounds were to him as expected as the ticking of a clock or the dull hum of technology. He felt strange if he didn't hear them.

No. Vegeta was excited because of his power. Three times in a single day the Prince received a mortal wound; three times his body healed itself. Now that he had fully recovered, he felt that he had an entirely new caliber of strength.

"Don't go!" Vegeta barked after them, tossing a ball of energy here and there to test his new abilities, "The fun has just begun!"

"To return to the topic," said Piccolo, sitting at the end of a long, narrow conference table occupied by many a green head—and one blue head, "who did he name as his successor while you were in the afterlife?" He turned his eyes back and forth to look at both Dende and Muri.

"I believe…" Dende started in a soft voice, rubbing his chin in thought, "Well, he was about to name Muri, I think. But then Mr. Popo's wish was granted, and we all appeared on Namek for a second and then suddenly appeared here on Earth." These words were accompanied by the slow, wise nods of the Namek Elders sitting gravely around the table.

"And the Dragon Balls did not travel with you?" Piccolo turned his eyes to the one called Muri who had been the Great Elder's intended successor.

"I said that they _did _travel with us. We have put them into safe-keeping," Muri calmly asserted, "but now they are just stones—round, grey stones."

"Can't you reactivate them?" Piccolo asked.

"I have already tried, but it didn't work," Muri lamented, "I guess…we were brought back to life before the Elder had a chance to name me. Those orbs are Dragon Balls no longer, no matter what summoning words we might use."

"I don't understand. Shouldn't the Great Elder have been resurrected as well?" a high, sweet but somewhat braying voice resounded throughout the conference room. It seemed so unfit for the room of brooding, male aliens to be suddenly struck with the sound of an ever cheery, female voice. But Bulma—she felt otherwise.

It was unfit, in her opinion, for the Capsule Corp Executive Conference Room to be used as an alien gathering place. Since she brought the Nameks to her estate three days ago, they had been drawn to the room like magnets. At first, she let boys be boys (or perhaps let asexually reproduced aliens be asexually reproduced aliens?). Soon, though, she had had it. She demanded entry into their summits, and the Nameks granted her wish.

She was wearing, for the first time, her new sleeveless, tight-fitting gown. It matched her eyes and hair perfectly and made her seem to radiate blue. She had bought it as a ritual celebration upon her return to Earth. When she put it on that morning, she just knew it!

"By Kami, I'm gorgeous!" she winked at herself in the mirror and then scurried off to the conference room—the same one in which she now sat as the deliberating judge. Or at least she felt like the deliberating judge since she sat at the head of the table.

At the start of the meeting, Bulma felt a smirk creep onto her face, a smirk that a lord would use when admiring the far reaches of his domain. She tried to suppress it, yet she could not help it. Her father had never given her the chance to sit at the head, and now here she was, leading a conference of aliens!

There was, though, a catch. Asexually reproduced aliens had no class. They neither knew nor complimented a gorgeous girl when they saw one. Yet that pique had long been dismissed from Bulma's mind, and her smirk wiped clean off her features. At that moment, she was engrossed in the discussion. All she wanted to know was why. Why hadn't the Great Elder been resurrected?

"Mr. Popo's wish was to bring back all the people Freeza and his men had killed on Namek," said a wrinkled old Elder, looking much like a pruned green grape, "The Great Elder must have died of old age—so he was not included in the wish."

"Nor was Tuno's village," Dende murmured morosely, "since _Vegeta_ was the one that _murdered_ them." He tightened his hands into small fists. He kicked himself inside for healing Vegeta on Namek. He had disliked that Saiyajin from the start, but since Kaiosama told them that Freeza was dead, Dende could honestly say that he hated Vegeta more than anyone in the universe.

Dende's gloom infected the room, and everyone fell into a dark silence until Bulma defied it fearlessly.

"There has to be a way to reactivate your Dragon Balls! There just has to be!" she resolved.

"No," Muri sighed, though he still smiled appreciatively at Bulma's optimism, "I'm afraid there isn't. Only while the Great Elder lives can the Dragon Balls live, and there is no Elder now. If we want a new set of Dragon Balls, I'll have to make them myself. And yes, I may have been the Elder's desired successor, but I am not yet powerful enough to do that immediately. It will take several years before I am able to make them successfully."

"Then get to it," ordered Piccolo while crossing his arms, "We need them as quickly as possible. Kuririn, Chaozu, and," he paused, "even Goku…we won't be able to bring any of them back without your Dragon Balls. They already died twice."

"Right," Muri accepted the command.

"Yeah!" Bulma nodded, "And we have to wait a whole year before we can bring Yamcha back—or is that what we'll be doing with our Dragon Balls?" She glanced at Piccolo curiously. He failed to answer or make eye contact.

Suddenly, there was a muffled boom, and the ground shook. The lights flickered off and on. Then all went back to normal. Everyone in the room mumbled between each other, trying to think of what could have caused the quake.

Bulma's phone vibrated. She clawed into her purse and pulled out her phone. Pressing a few buttons, she read the tiny screen with an expression of mounting rage.

"It's a security breach! In front of the clinic, for Kami's sake!" scrolling down, she read further and then jumped to her feet with a flushed face, "It's Vegeta!"

She darted to a window and slid it open noisily, ranting loudly, "That ass hole better not be killing _my _employees! C'mon! Let's go!" She locked her eyes with Piccolo's resolutely. For a moment, his usual calm glinted with confusion.

"What? You mean, carry you while I fly?" he asked in as bashful a tone as he could, though he seemed unpracticed in it, sounding insulted instead.

"What else you green dimwit! Let's go!" She began to lift herself out the window, at which all the Nameks sprung to their feet nervously.

"It's too dangerous for y—" Piccolo tried to reason with her.

"If you don't catch me, I'll be madder than hell once you bring me back with the Dragon Balls! And don't you know anything about a woman's scorn?" her eyes flashed mischievously, and then she bound out of the window.

**A/N: **_Thanks for reading! Please review!_


	9. Chapter Eight: Unleashed

Chapter Eight: Unleashed

An immense invisible hand wove its fingers around her body—close and personal like a glove—and then plunged her down toward the pavement. Bulma had never realized how deeply she despised Isaac Newton until now. So what if he didn't actually invent gravity? She had to blame someone, and Newton seemed to be the most blameworthy at the time.

Only yards from the pavement, she suddenly felt two tense bars of muscle scoop around her shoulders and beneath her knees. The arms gathered her together loosely as if she were some unwieldy cactus. Then their grip tightened slightly as their owner jet high into the sky, zipping by so quickly that Bulma's hair and dress whipped to and fro.

Bulma breathed more easily. Piccolo, it seemed, had caught her in time. Yet she realized she had not confirmed this. Her eyes were squeezing shut as though her life depended on it.

"Get a hold of yourself!" she snapped at herself silently. Peeling her lids open, she saw green arms and a ruffling white turban. Her shoulders shuddered for a second; she couldn't help it: he was green, and he was creepy.

"You can stop screaming," droned the low rasp of Piccolo's voice, "I caught you."

She was screaming? She noticed that her mouth was ajar and her throat was torn. Still, she was insulted.

"I am not screaming!" she barked through a scowl.

"You were," Piccolo responded wearily.

"I was not!" Bulma brayed, increasing the volume of her voice with each word, "If you want to know what screaming really is, buster, I'd be glad to—"

"That will not be necessary," Piccolo cut her off with an indifferent voice. Bulma looked up at him, annoyed at his disinterest. She noticed that his eyes had widened slightly and his lips visibly twitched. She was content.

"Well, so long as you know your place," Bulma teased with a victorious smile. The green man, who before had kept his eyes locked forward, narrowed his lids and tossed Bulma a cold glance. He said nothing, though, and continued to rocket toward the clinic.

"You should not be coming; Vegeta is a warrior and a murderer—and not long ago one of Freeza's lackeys, as well. You will only be putting yourself in danger," he explained as the two neared a grey pillar of billowing smoke, dust and debris.

"Me in danger! Ha!" Bulma mocked, "That ape-ass is the one in danger! Hurting _my_ employees!"

"Do you think he gives a damn about that?" It was a rhetorical question—a command, more like. Piccolo's brooding eyes were daring Bulma to be as stupid as her words showed her to be when she actually encountered the Dark Prince. She did not seem to like the challenge. Frowning, she let out an exaggerated "humph" and threw her head aside moodily.

"When we get there," Piccolo continued his commands harshly, "stay back and do not say a word!" The words were pronounced so distinctly, Bulma was whipped out of her wrath. She felt docile for a moment. Hanging her head down a little, she mumbled, "Fine."

"He will kill you without hesitation."

"I said _fine_!" Bulma shouted and crossed her arms angrily. Averting her eyes from the green man, she noticed the world beneath her as Piccolo began to descend.

It was all smoke and dust and rubble. It was completely leveled; there was no sign of the clinic at all. She thought that they were in a construction zone for a moment, but then she began to see charred, bloody bodies littered here and there.

When Piccolo alighted on the shattered pavement, Bulma leaped from his arms and raced to the first body she saw. It was wheezing and half-buried beneath the wreckage of the attack.

"M-Miss," a voice croaked through a head that was so mutilated and burnt it no longer looked human, "Briefs?"

"Hi…" Tears bud their heads out of the corners of Bulma's eyes as she pulled at a large chunk of cement pinning the creature from the hip down. The cement was too heavy, though.

"I'll—I'll get you out of this," she smiled weakly at the thing beneath the stone. Her conscience felt ripped to shreds. _Thing_? _Creature_? This was a man for Kami's sake! What was she thinking? This was an employee who had been viciously, ruthlessly attacked.

She tugged harder and harder until beads of sweat tumbled down her forehead.

"Piccolo, damn it! Don't just stand there gawking! Help me!"

"He's dead."

"Not yet! Not if we help him, damn it!"

"He wasn't dead a second ago. He's dead now. Look."

Bulma glanced down at the man beneath the cement. He was as still as the stone atop him. Bulma screamed with grief and rage, reaching her hands to her head and pulling her hair at the roots with mounting frustration.

A bright light flashed to her left and shook her off her feet. Shooting her eyes up, she saw Piccolo jump and fly toward a man floating in the sky.

Vegeta.

Bulma sprung to her feet and darted up a slope—it seemed to be the remains of a building's exterior wall. She clambered higher, over all the flotsam until she at last reached the top of the tallest mound of wreckage. She looked up at Piccolo and Vegeta. Cupping her mouth to more accurately direct her shout, she called out.

"Hey, you! Jack ass! Vegeta! Come down here!"

The Prince ignored it; he was absorbed in his training. He flexed his muscles in various stretches, finishing with his warm-up. Piccolo paled a little (if green men do pale), glowering down at Bulma and motioning for her stop. He had not bothered to even address the Prince but instead hovered at the Saiyajin's side, calculating what Vegeta's next move might be.

Bulma contorted her face furiously and screamed more loudly.

"Come down here, you stupid cowardly ape! Come on!"

The Prince ignored it, still stretching; Piccolo motioned at her more wildly; she grew more furious. Feeling the heat rise in her cheeks, she screamed as loudly and as nastily as she could.

"If you think this is anything compared to what _Goku _can do, you're just fooling yourself, Vegeta!"

The Prince did not ignore that. He immediately glared down at the impertinent woman and materialized in front of her. She began to step back fearfully, but Vegeta caught her face in his hand. Dragging her by her mouth, he lifted her within inches of his snarling visage so that she could feel his hot breath. The lethal glint in his eyes seemed to be envisioning the woman's doom.

Bulma closed her eyes and imagined herself beneath the jaw of a hungry predator or a mad dog unleashed. It was panting with provocation. It was panting with bloodlust. It was squeezing her mouth so hard, she knew her face would bruise.

She hoped it would be a painless death.

"Enough, Vegeta!" snapped Piccolo as he landed a few feet behind the Prince, "You've done enough harm as it is. Let her go. A warrior's honor relies upon his own deeds not others' words."

Vegeta glanced over his shoulder with a smirk. He loosened his grip, and Bulma wrenched herself free.

"I suppose her death can be delayed," Vegeta crossed his arms and turned his back to Bulma in order to face Piccolo, "It's no different than when I spared that Ginyu-frog. She's so weak and pathetic, sparing her life is more cruel a death than death itself."

Vegeta felt a small tap on the back of his head. Bulma had slapped him.

"You ass hole!" Bulma shrieked, her whole body trembling with ire, "Who the hell do you think you are? Insulting your hostess! Going around and killing _my _employees and destroying _my _buildings!"

Vegeta did not even look back. He tried to ignore the screeching harpy as he locked eyes with Piccolo. They both tacitly knew and readied themselves in fighting stances. Yet Bulma refused to relent. Her shrieks shattered the ears as she brayed louder and louder.

"Don't you know how damned expensive it is to run a business?" she continued to squeal at Vegeta's back, "I have to give my employees _quality_ facilities in _quality_ buildings so that they can make _quality_ products! And here you are, blowing everything up! I bet you don't even know what _quality_ means! Why would you? You're just some insentient ape going around and fucking destroying everything because you don't know how the fuck to do anything else!"

Vegeta's ears began to itch; a feeling of regret brewed at the pit of his stomach. Perhaps he should have killed her, but he was just so eager to test himself in a fight! And so he leered forward doggedly, bending his knees and preparing to lunge at his green opponent. He refused to let this Ginyu-frog-woman annoy him.

"And who the hell are you to hurt _my _employees?" Bulma squawked, now waving her arms to accompany each vehement syllable, "What did they do to you? And what about their families? They don't get coverage for _alien_ attacks! They'll have to wait a whole damned year before we can bring back their loved ones with the Dragon Balls! Who the hell do you think you—"

"I am," Vegeta roared back, wheeling around toward Bulma, "the _Eternal _Prince of _All _Saiyajins!" He lifted his hand; it was cocooned with a white orb of energy. Bulma widened her eyes and knew. She knew that she was going to die right then and there.

A blur of green flashed in front of her. Bulma saw it kick aside Vegeta's hand, and she felt it shove her to the foot of the mound of wreckage. Then there was a deafening crash, blasting the mound into oblivion. Bulma lay limp a moment, cringing and covering her head from airborne rubble. A few rocks grazed her head, but she paid no heed to them.

As the world spun around her, Bulma dazedly lifted herself to her feet. Feeling something wet trickle down her forehead, she wiped the moisture away. When she brought her hand down, she saw red; when she glanced forward, she saw white. Another ki blast hurtled into the ground, blinding the eyes. Bulma was thrown to off her feet again. Once she fell on her back, her head dribbled against the cement, smacking her into half-consciousness.

"No more warm-ups, Namek!" she heard a voice bellow, "I need a real fight to test my new strength!"


	10. Chapter Nine: The Titans Spar

Chapter Nine: The Titans Spar

_One-two_. _One-two_. _Left-right_. _Left-right_.

Green fists ripped through the air, charging forward with such speed that even the winged-shod Hermes would not have been able to see them. Yet this was not fast enough. The Prince predicted his opponent's every move. The Namek had fallen into such a dilapidated rhythm, Vegeta had to suppress a yawn.

_One-two-three_. _Left-left-right_.

Piccolo changed the combination and increased the pace. Still he was unable to lay a finger on the bored Prince.

_One-two-three_. _Left-right-left_.

"Faster, fool!" Vegeta taunted with an infuriating smirk as Piccolo tore his fist toward the Saiyajin's face. Vegeta bent his head aside. With one hand, he grappled Piccolo's forearm before the Namek had a chance to pull it back to safety. Piccolo tugged his arm toward his body, but he could not free himself from Vegeta's steel grip.

"What did I tell you about warm-ups?" The Prince sneered. Twirling around, he threw Piccolo down into the rubble like a discus. Dust shot up in a mushroom cloud over the labyrinth of wreckage. The Prince squinted but could not see his prey through the haze. Lowering his head for a better look, he waited in the air like a greedy wolf.

"Come on, Namek!" he shouted down to Piccolo, "Come back up here and fight me!"

Nothing.

Vegeta scowled and crossed his arms. Had he his tail, he would have wagged it like a vexed cat. His brows were so steep in his frown that they formed the same acute angles a cat's ears make while hissing.

A growl slipped through his lips. He could foresee what Piccolo wanted him to do. He refused to budge, though.

"The Prince lowers himself for no one," he thought but then dismissed the words immediately. He was too eager. He wanted the fight to continue, and Piccolo was too patient to be enticed into the next move. Vegeta would have to go down there into the dust.

He heaved an angry sigh, "Imbecile!"

A rowdy breeze bustled through Vegeta's hospital smock, puffing it out like a blowfish. Examining the scene below one last time, the Prince grunted angrily and descended into the dust, feet first. Wind from the dust cloud swept into his already inflated smock so that it began to flap upwards, revealing two leaden thighs.

Alighting onto a cement block, Vegeta kept his arms crossed and mechanically probed his surroundings. The dust had yet to subside, but the Prince was not of the mind to wait any longer. Reaching inside himself, he summoned forth a small flicker of his ki to waft away the haze. As he did this, his smock flailed more than ever; Vegeta, though, paid no heed to it, having forgotten entirely what he was wearing.

Suddenly, he felt himself yanked from behind by the end of the smock. Turning around, his face met with a hard foot before he even realized it. To prevent further damage, Vegeta soared back into the sky with Piccolo trailing behind him.

"I saw that move clearly," Vegeta chided himself in his thoughts while he flew in search of a more amenable fighting environment, "I could easily have prevented it." He was caught by surprise. He had thought he could ignore trivial details like how his own garb could be used against him, but he was proven wrong. He had the evidence right on his cheek.

Or did he?

Vegeta gingerly pressed his fingers on his cheek. There was no sting or bruise. There was no evidence of the recent blow it had sustained at all. Vegeta plainly sensed how much ki Piccolo had concentrated into that kick; it was substantial. Yet it had done nothing to Vegeta.

The Prince smirked.

"Good," he thought while hurtling toward a level valley beyond the city, where his opponent could gain no cravenly advantage through terrain. He landed squarely, his feet spread evenly apart and his arms cocked at his side. Soon after, Piccolo alighted on the ground in a similar position.

The two Titans of power stood across from each other in a manner not unlike two dueling cowboys in the Wild West. As a breeze whistled by, a swirl of dust rolled between them in the shape of a tumbleweed.

"No more tricks, Namek," Vegeta spat out.

"War is deception, is it not?"

"War? It is," Vegeta rejoined, showing no emotion and not moving an inch from his stance, "Spars? Not always. Let's spar, I say. The two of us."

"To what purpose?" Piccolo asked.

"To test our strengths. You were strong, nearly as strong as me, for a time, back before I defeated Freeza."

"Before _you _defeated Freeza?" Piccolo arched a brow curiously. He combed his memory and then realized how uninformed Vegeta really was.

The Prince thought that when he pinned Freeza beneath the Genki-Dama, the tyrant had died. The Prince thought he had defeated Freeza, that Goku still lived, that neither of the two Saiyajins had yet achieved the level of Super Saiyajin.

"Yes!" Vegeta barked boastfully, wanting to back up his words with gesticulation but knowing better, "Now that Freeza is out of the way, I think a good stretch with you will be enough to make me the Super Saiyajin. Then I can snuff out that Kakarrot and be on my way."

Piccolo did not know what Vegeta would do if the Prince believed Goku were dead as all the others did. Not wanting to figure out, the Namek decided to play along.

"Alright," he said curtly, "Enough speech. Let's begin."

"No more tricks. Just pure power."

"Just power."

"Then it's time to rid of any temptations, no?" Vegeta cautiously reached up his hands to the collar of his smock and ripped it from top to bottom. He rolled the cloth off his shoulders, chest and naval and tied it around his waist and between his legs.

The Prince returned to his fighting stance and waited impatiently. He was no longer burdened with a recklessly loose smock. Instead, he stood with his wide shoulders stretching out and erecting his toned chest into the air. He stood nearly bare, covered only by an improvised loincloth. All his muscles and scars were revealed to his enemy with pride.

The Namek said nothing and made no expressions. Grimly, he tossed his turban and cape aside.

Then he grumbled, "Round Two."

"On three," Vegeta announced, "One, two—Go!" As he spoke this last word, he felt inexplicably compelled to reach out his arms to the heavens. He bellowed out a roar, and his ki exploded out of his being, raising many of the rocks from the ground and pulverizing the rest into nothingness.

The force of this rising energy blasted Piccolo onto his back. The green man had to heave himself up with great persistence to return to his feet, as though he were wrestling with hurricane winds.

"So close! So close!" The Prince roared euphorically. His mystic and god-like smile crept onto his face and mixed with a touch of his frothy madness, making him look to be a lunatic.

"Yes!" Vegeta groaned gleefully as power poured out of his body, "Yes! I am the Legendary!"

Piccolo grimaced. He had to stop this. The Earth itself was trembling beneath the overwhelming power, and he could see the city behind him erupting into a panic.

"No, Vegeta!" he shouted, "You'll never be."

Vegeta threw his eyes at the Namek and immediately ripped forward, landing a hard punch on Piccolo's face. Piccolo was stunned out of reality for a moment, but swiftly regained consciousness. As his body continued to hurtle backward, he bent his back a little, leading him into a back flip.

Having landed, Piccolo spun around to fly toward Vegeta, but the Prince bound onto him out of nowhere. Vegeta threw his punches so rapidly and forcefully, Piccolo could only evade one or two of the combinations. He dared not deflect any of the throws, fearing it would do more harm than good.

Vegeta exhaled fiercely with each punch, with each kick, with each elbow to the face and each knee to the stomach. He got the damned Namek nearly every time. Vegeta's rapturous grin grew wider the more he quickened the pace, the more wildly he threw each punch, the more he felt bone against bone and the more he heard the cracking and the grunting of battle.

As yet another fist met yet another face, the Namek's blood splattered onto Vegeta's bared chest and rolled down until it mixed with the accumulating sweat. Quickly, Vegeta followed up with a whip of his foot, and Piccolo plummeted into the ground.

Panting, the Prince settled his feet onto the earth. His opponent lay down, exhausted, and did not try to get back up.

"Do you like it, Namek? Do you like my power?" asked Vegeta while jabbing a foot into a well-worn side of Piccolo's ribcage. Piccolo struggled not to wince and then turned his eyes toward Vegeta and smiled widely. This was a phenomenon, really, as the green man reserved smiles only for the weightiest of all times.

"It is nothing," he chuckled, "It's the dust beneath your feet. Nothing."

Vegeta scowled and kicked the Namek in the stomach. Piccolo coughed and rasped desperately, swallowing down all the air he could gather. His foot rested lightly atop the Namek's stomach.

Vegeta stooped over and hissed, "What do you mean _nothing_? It's more than you could ever imagine! It'll prove to be your death, worm! And you say _nothing_! Ha!"

"Your power is greater than mine," Piccolo conceded tiredly, "but it is nothing compared to…to Goku's when he became the Super Saiyajin and defeated Freeza."

This caught the Saiyajin off-guard, and Piccolo was able to leap onto his feet and with a hasty ki blast shove Vegeta away several yards. The Prince caught and threw the blast to the side. He glared at Piccolo hatefully, his eyes bloodshot with disbelief.

"Gohan saw the transformation with his own eyes!" Piccolo confessed, "There was a great flash of light, like the sun. The light lingered in Gohan's eyes and then receded into an aura encasing his father. Goku's hair had morphed into golden spikes one would see in a sculpure, and his eyes flickered green."

Golden light, golden hair, green eyes. Yes. Vegeta remembered hearing mention of such things in the legends, but he never told Kakarrot of this or the half-blood or anyone else for that matter. It had to be true. But no. No. It could not be.

"Liar!" He hollered as he dashed toward Piccolo. The green man only realized that Vegeta was charging toward him at the last moment. He careened to his side but not in time. Vegeta caught Piccolo's right shoulder and arm, and with the force of his charge ripped it clear out of the socket.

Piccolo tumbled onto his knees, shaking with pain, shaking without his shoulder and arm. The blood from the dismembered limb bathed Vegeta's naked chest and poured down onto his legs. In fury, Vegeta threw the limb upward and then annihilated it midair with a blinding blast.

"Liar," he grumbled under his breath, "liar, liar."

**A/N: **_Thank you for reading! Please share your input!_


	11. Chapter Ten: How the World Burns

Chapter Ten: How the World Burns

By the time Bulma could walk without toppling over in confusion, Piccolo and Vegeta were nowhere in sight. Massaging her temples wearily, she thought back. She vaguely recollected seeing the two fly out of the city, though she did not know in which direction.

The ground shook beneath her. Bulma tossed her eyes to both sides and saw that the quake extended throughout the whole city, not just through the small wasteland of what had once been Capsule Corp Clinic.

"It's them…" she mumbled to herself as the earth rumbled. The vibrations caused the piles of wreckage around her to collapse. Blocks of cement rolled down and plopped onto the ground with a crash. Bulma ducked her head down and scrambled out of the jetsam. She sprinted back toward Capsule Corp's main building, disregarding how much skin this revealed while wearing so short and tight a dress.

As she neared the building, Bulma knew what she had to do. If her worst fears came true, it would be necessary to tell the city—the whole Earth to go into hiding. Firstly, though, she needed to warn the Nameks and the remaining employees on the premises. Then, she needed to call Gohan. And fast. He was the only remaining Z Fighter that could lend a helping hand to Piccolo.

By the time she reached the building, the Nameks and numerous employees were buzzing around the entrance curiously. They all watched the western sky where fiery flashes streaked by like lightning. Bulma strode into the edge of the crowd, poking her head up in search of any familiar faces.

"Bulma!" a voice called from behind. She twirled around to see a wizened form cloaked with a lab coat and laden with a black cat on one hunched shoulder.

"Daddy!" Bulma immediately flung her arms around her father with tears in her eyes, "The clinic has been…destroyed." Dr. Briefs pulled her back to look into her face with wonder.

"Vegeta," she uttered as a full explanation.

Her father nodded knowingly and responded, "I thought I saw a Namek flying around with someone earlier when I got word of the security breach. That explains it. I figured something like that had happened.

"I contacted the city officials. The city is in a state of emergency; they're moving as many people to safety as possible. I told them military efforts are useless, so hopefully they won't do anything stupid."

"Daddy," Bulma turned her eyes toward the ground sadly, "I think we need to tell a whole lot more than just the city officials about this."

"How big do you think this problem'll be?" Dr. Briefs pried at his daughter, his face overflowing with curiosity, "Regional? National?"

Bulma hesitated. She regretted to say it, but she had to.

"Global," she murmured. Dr. Briefs sighed but gave a short and understanding nod.

"I see," he hummed lowly, "In that case, I need to contact the necessary authorities." He moved away from his daughter, but she caught his sleeve and frowned at him worriedly.

"But what about everyone here?" With a fling of her head, Bulma motioned to the crowd around her.

"I'll trust you to get everyone at Capsule Corp to safety," Dr. Briefs spoke solemnly, "There's a bunker underground this building. You take care of it." He moved away, only to have his sleeve tugged again.

"Where's Mom?" Bulma asked.

"Inside. Now, I've got to go."

"Right," Bulma nodded and released her father.

Smiling weakly, she said, "You be careful."

"You, too, Bulma." Then Dr. Briefs marched off to work.

They were playing cat-and-mouse. Piccolo was shooting across the heavens in this and that direction, trying to gain enough time to regenerate his arm. The loss of blood was weakening him, and he had to recover his limb immediately. On the other hand, Vegeta was in no hurry to kill the Namek. Although he always appeared at the last moment, he did drag behind and granted the weakling a certain cushion of space. The Prince needed to find out just how much of the green man's words were true.

"It's not possible," he thought to himself decidedly, throwing a ki blast after the Namek, "The level of Super Saiyajin is a right reserved to the Elite alone, passed down from one generation to the next and among them, rarely ever achieved—and then only by the Elite of the Elite."

The Namek bounced a foot on the ground to avoid the blast and shot back into the sky. He reared to a halt when Vegeta suddenly appeared before him.

"The level of Super Saiyajin is a right. A blood-right. An inviolable birthright," Vegeta assured himself in silence, "It's my right. It has never and will never belong to a low-class dog. That would be a heinous theft. That would be an insult to the Legend. An insult to my people. An insult to _me_. No. It simply is not possible."

Vegeta let Piccolo turn sharply and fly in another direction. The Prince was of a mind to let the green man exhaust himself. Wheedling out the desired information afterward would be easier that way.

"He is lying," Vegeta concluded as his eyes followed the haphazard flight of the Namek, "He recognizes my superior ki and is trying to entice and distract me to gain some unfair advantage. The plan isn't working in his favor at all."

Vegeta felt relieved. An onerous yoke lifted itself from his shoulders and vanished. He was glad to know that his immortality had regained him the detachment he had lost since his defeat on Earth. This gave him a wider perspective and clarity of thought, unclouded by the haze of emotions.

Still, he also felt that his passions had not died. They were merely pilloried in his heart's dungeon, festering and writhing like a madman. At the back of his mind, he wondered over the price of this imprisonment. Once his passions were to be unleashed, what would prevent them from gushing out like water through a broken damn?

Piccolo flew over Vegeta, who shot after the Namek a volley of meandering ki blasts.

"I was born with that right, and I alone can achieve it. Damn it, I must achieve it," his thoughts began to fume as he relapsed into his frustrations, "I spent my entire life trying and trying to achieve it so that I could at long last destroy that Freeza bastard. I will not have a damned third-class clown seize both my vengeance and my birthright from me as if they were some common sweets!"

No. Clarity. Detachment. Attachment. To a birthright. His right. Theft. Of that right. By the clown. That damned clown. Madness. Absolute madness.

No. Clarity. Must keep clarity. But how?

"Name them," he commanded himself, "Name the things that you can clearly see."

Clearly, the Namek was weak. Clearly, in order to avoid utter defeat, the Namek had to resort to craven tactics. Clearly, then, the Namek had lied. Kakarrot was no Super Saiyajin.

"Are you tired yet, Namek?" Having regained his confidence, Vegeta bellowed after Piccolo with a bored toss of his head, "You look it. I, though, can go on for days at this rate. What do you say we take a break, hmm? For your sake."

Gasping for air like a drowning man, Piccolo descended to the ground and then collapsed to his knees. With one furious scream, he concentrated as much as he could and another arm shot out from his shoulder.

"Your arm's back?" Vegeta said smugly as he landed a yard before his prey, "And I went to all that trouble to remove it."

"You're going to destroy this world, aren't you?" Piccolo heaved out in panting, painful syllables, "Even after we took pity on you and gave you shelter." Vegeta threw his head back and cackled with scathing disgust.

"You took pity on me? Why, that's even more reason to destroy you!" Vegeta stared down at his opponent, "So, yes, to answer your question. I am going to destroy this place."

"What do you think you will accomplish?" Piccolo pushed himself onto his feet in a fighting stance.

"Accomplish?" Vegeta spat, "I'm not trying to accomplish anything by this. This is merely a warm-up. You know that yourself. Besides, I need a sufficient arena for my battle with Kakarrot. Earth seems sufficient enough. But it will be even more sufficient once it is shed of all extraneous distractions."

"Extraneous distractions," Piccolo echoed coldly, "You mean people."

Vegeta merely smirked.

"I, too, was once corrupt," Piccolo revealed with a solemn tone, "Now, though, I can see in you how foolish I was in my day. No, Vegeta. I cannot let you do that." He crouched down and pulled his fists back, wanting more than ever to attack. He knew, though, that if he did, he would die.

"No," Vegeta pretended sadness, wagging his head low, "You _wish _you could not let me do that. As for reality, you are inferior to me."

"That is not what I meant," Piccolo spoke further, "I know I am no match for you. I know also that Goku could beat you easily if he were here, as he should've done the first time round. But he isn't here."

"No?" Vegeta closed his eyes and searched for that detestably familiar ki.

"No," he confirmed, "he isn't here. Where is he then?"

"He's dead. Namek exploded a little after he defeated Freeza."

"Ha!" Vegeta scowled, still resolved on disbelief. He squeezed his arms closer to his body so that he looked to be hugging himself.

"_If _he isn't just hiding, _if _what you say is true," he hissed, "the mere explosion of a planet would not have killed him."

"Not even a Saiyajin can survive in space."

"Freeza's ship—"

"Was broken." When Piccolo finished the statement, he watched on impassively. As he feared, there was no initial reaction—only calculation. He saw the wheels turning and the computations crunching within Vegeta's visage. To anyone else, there would be nothing to see except the slightest of twitches on the edge of the lips. Yet Piccolo had seen enough of Vegeta to know that the Prince was not taking the news well.

"I do not believe you," the Prince at last announced stonily, "You lie."

"Then how do you account for Goku's absence?"

"The clown's absence is a result of cowardice," Vegeta justified with a flicker of his ki. He had restored his detachment, yet he had not destroyed his emotions. The anger was nibbling at his patience like a swarm of piranhas.

"I think you of all people should know by now," Piccolo crouched down lower, bracing for the inevitable, "Goku is no coward."

"Then he should come out and fight me!" Vegeta roared, pulling down two fists at his sides and bursting out with energy.

"He cannot!"

"He can! He will! I'll make him! I'll burn this whole damned world to ash!"

With that, the Prince soared high into the sky. All the while during his ascent, his forefinger was brandished above him. Over it swirled a hairline crack of light, which pulse and pulsed until it rolled into a ball of ki. By the time Vegeta halted suddenly and looked down at the Earth, the ball had grown as large as a boulder, bulbous and pregnant with energy.

The Prince held both hands over his head. He was resolved. The whole damned world would burn in the flames of his wrath. How could Kakarrot hide from him then?

With much difficulty, Bulma had managed to escort all four hundred and thirty-two employees currently on the premises, plus her mother and all the Nameks, to the safety of the underground bunker. This was a feat of some measure, but she had no time to revel in success.

Immediately, she returned to the ground level of Capsule Corp headquarters, kicking herself the whole way for not bringing her purse and phone with her. Half pacing, half jogging, she sped over to the front desk and lurched onto a telephone.

After pressing several buttons, she waited. And waited.

"Damn it, Gohan! Answer the—"

"Hello?"

"Chi Chi? Is that you?"

"Bulma! Hi! It's been so long since we la—"

"Chi Chi, I really can't talk right now. Is Gohan there?"

"No."

"No? Where is he? I need to talk to him immediately!"

"Well, that's what I was about to say. It's been so long since we last saw you that Gohan just up and flew off to your place, or at least that's what the ingrate yelled back after he flew out of his room—before he finished his studies, mind you! You will be sure to tell him to get right back over here and finish his work once he arrives, won't you? If you don't, so help me…"

"This really isn't the time, Chi Chi!" Bulma snapped severely and then continued in a whisper, "We are in trouble. Gohan probably sensed the change in ki and left to join the battle. I don't think anyone can talk sense into Vegeta. He is going to have to fight again."

"Who is? Vegeta is?"

"Gohan is."

"Gohan? Fight? But! But he just got back from fighting three days ago! He's already behind in his studies enough as it is!"

"I know, and I'm sorry. But it's Vegeta. I really think we're all in danger. I was there. I saw what Gohan must now feel."

"I don't care what the boy feels! Doesn't he care at all about my poor nerves?"

"I saw it—something in his eyes. It was cold and cruel…I really don't know…it was like—like a, a ball of nothing but ice, ice, ice."

"My poor nerves! My poor baby!"

"Such cruelty. Such cold cruelty in his eyes."

"My poor boy!"

"Do you know anything about Dante's _Inferno_?"

"What are you talking about? What in the world does that have to do with my baby boy?"

"Isn't the heart of hell nothing but ice?"

"My poor baby boy!"

"Nothing but ice, ice, ice."

"My _baby_ fighting _more _monsters _again_!"

"Ice. I think that's what he is. Ice. Evil. As frozen as Freeza." There was a long silence between the two aggrieved women. The despair of quiet was eroding their spirits, until as always Bulma found herself braving the unknown with what she did know.

"You have to get to safety, Chi Chi," she stated, "Get yourself and everyone else around you underground—in a cave or something. Get to safety. Tell Master Roshi and the others if you can."

"O-okay."

Soon after the conversation dwindled and died. Bulma knew Gohan was coming. She knew she had done all she could for her employees and the Nameks. She knew her father would be doing the same for the remainder of the populace. One question now lingered in her thoughts.

What was she supposed to do? Hide in the underground, as well? Never. She stood on the sidelines on Namek, and while she was there she resolved never to be so futile a bystander again.

"I've got it!" she shouted in epiphany and raced out of the room.

**A/N: **_Thank you for reading! Please share your input!_


	12. Chapter Eleven: The Price of Peace

Chapter Eleven: The Price of Peace

The sphere of energy plunged toward the Earth's surface. Piccolo lunged into the air to meet it, both his hands proffered before him. Like water against rock, the orb clanged into Piccolo's palms and poured down on him relentlessly. Even though he had summoned all the energy inside himself, he still felt the force of the ki ball pressing him down toward the ground.

As the orb approached the Earth's surface, the canopy of a nearby coppice disintegrated under the heat and the pebbles trembled in their places. Piccolo used all the energy left within him to stall the orb's landing. He felt his muscles tense and tear as he crouched down under the overwhelming orb. Falling onto his knees, he was driven further, further down, and the orb drilled closer, closer toward the ground.

Then, without warning, it seemed that half the load was snatched out of his hands. The orb even began to levitate upwards—away from the Earth!

"Just a little more, Sensei! If we push just a little harder!" a child's voice strained. Through the streams of sweat clouding his vision, Piccolo, glancing to his right, saw the small form of Gohan.

The boy was clad in his usual dark blue fighting attire, and he wore on his face a deep scowl that seemed too sober to belong on young Gohan's brow. If anything, the boy looked prepared.

As he struggled through a groan, Gohan adjusted both his hands beneath the sphere. Closing his eyes, he tried to remember his darkest, angriest memories. The energy boiled inside him, and he found himself piqued for battle.

"You ready?" he yelled.

"Ready," said Piccolo. The two looked at each other and smirked. In unison they lifted their arms upward and heaved the sphere of ki into space. Before either of them had time to sigh with relief, a shower of disc-shaped ki blasts surged toward them like bullets from a Gatling gun.

Gohan bound to the side, avoiding one blast, and then again and again he dodged the oncoming blasts at the last moment until he had to dart into the sky to avoid further danger. Breathing heavily, he glanced down to see that Piccolo had not been so lucky.

The green man, already weary from battle, had received a severe blow to his thigh. He limped off of the ground and floated loosely to Gohan's side.

"Well, well. The brat's back. But I don't have any time for this. Any amusement I had planned from this has been forgotten. My patience is lost. I will have no more games from anyone." Gohan heard a dull growl traveling on the wind.

"What're you talking about? This isn't a game, Vegeta!" Gohan shouted furiously, brandishing a fist, "Freeza's gone! The fighting's over!"

"It is never over," the growl crept through the Prince's crookedly arched lips. With that, Vegeta swung a fist forward. Flashing out of sight, he suddenly appeared with a fist ramming toward Gohan's face. At the last moment, Piccolo stuck in a shoulder to guard the boy. Vegeta's steel punch threw into the Namek.

"Piccolo!" Gohan howled and then bound toward the Prince, foot first. Vegeta grasped the boy's foot and began to twirl Gohan round when the Namek thrust his fist toward the Prince's face. Vegeta shifted around and easily dodged the punch, throwing Gohan into the ground as he moved. Yet the Namek persisted, punching and elbowing in a rushed rhythm as he wheezed in exasperation.

Gohan immediately bounced off the ground, back into action. He joined Piccolo in the ceaseless medley of punches, kicks, and more. They both moved wildly, flailing their limbs in an increasingly desperate attempt to land at least one punch.

Vegeta dodged with perfection, moving no more than necessary each time. Piccolo's and Gohan's fists both hurtled toward him. Abruptly, Vegeta threw his open palms toward each of his foe's fists. Out came two ki blasts that caught both targets by surprise. Not yet exhausted, Gohan deftly slipped his fist out of the way of the blast. A pain scraped his upper arm; twirling around as he soared toward the ground, he wondered if Piccolo was as lucky as he.

The smoke from the blasts subsided and through it came Piccolo's left fist—his left. His right had been completely shot off from Vegeta's blast. The Prince rolled his eyes in irritation. The damned green grub would not surrender, and the Saiyajin's patience had already fled from sight.

Still, Piccolo tossed his fist forward and then kicked his feet and knees toward his enemy without a moment's pause. The Prince again dodged without effort, looking as if he had decided to let a worm have its last writhe before he squashed it beneath his foot.

All the while, Gohan planted his feet in the dirt and let his wrath thrash inside him until his eyes burnt like a newborn ember in two black pieces of coal. He cocked his hands behind him while locking his eyes on the Prince.

It started as a soft glow in between Gohan's hands and then burst into a round flicker of light. Gohan pulled his hands back a little farther and waited for an opening to shoot safely passed Piccolo into the Dark Prince.

Piccolo tore forward one last stubborn punch. Vegeta clutched his foe's fist, pulled Piccolo closer, and threw the base of his palm into the Namek's face. Piccolo flew helplessly downward into a mountainside.

Gohan shoved his hands forward. A beam of light shot forward at a stunning speed, perfectly aimed. It loomed over its target, rapidly charging onward and growing in might the closer it came to Vegeta. Gohan squeezed his eyes shut as the beam flashed a blinding light.

The blast met its target.

Opening his eyes, Gohan saw that the blast was being deflected. Vegeta was managing to redirect the whole blast with but a single forearm lifted in front of his body as if he were merely guarding his hair from a ruffling wind.

Furious, Gohan threw even more of his anger and his energy into the blast. Still, it just bounced off Vegeta's forearm into a mountainside—the same mountainside. The same one. For a little longer, Gohan continued to shoot forward all of his energy, Vegeta continued to deflect it, and that mountainside continued to explode into oblivion. That same mountainside. That same mountainside into which Vegeta had just thrown Piccolo.

The blast stopped suddenly when Gohan realized it.

"Oh no…" the boy murmured ominously, a black dread constricting in the pit of his stomach.

"Only a half-blood…and already you can take that Namek when you let your emotions get the best of you," Gohan heard a gruff voice rasp, but he was too consumed by his dread to care who spoke, "Almost im—no. It isn't impressive at all. The Namek was weak."

Gohan stared forward doggedly. The mountainside—the entire mountain had completely evaporated. It was nowhere in sight. No signs of life, no soft or distant ki throbbing on the edge of its life. Nothing.

"You don't feel his ki, brat, because there isn't any ki to feel," Vegeta growled as he descended in front of the half-breed with his arms crossed and brows set in a steep scowl, "The Namek's dead. You killed him."

Landing a pace or two from Gohan, the Prince added through a smirk, "With a little help from me, of course."

Vegeta raised his left arm and backhanded the boy into the ground. Gohan continued to watch the nonexistent mountainside with vigilance—hoping, dreaming. Salty tears swelled in his eyes.

The Prince planted a foot on Gohan's stomach. The boy wheezed. Looking down, Vegeta looked to be examining an odd spectacle, some unfortunate bird he had shot down from the sky. The Prince's smirk grew nearly into a grin.

"Now, brat," he hissed, stooping his head over his victim like a lurking vulture, "tears are for weaklings and women. Contrary to everything my eyes say, you are no woman. But tell me, mutt, are you a weakling?"

Vegeta pressed his leg down, grinding his foot into Gohan's stomach. The boy gasped, coughing up little balls of spit, which after levitating in the air for a moment, fell down and splashed onto his face.

"There'd be no point in sparing you if you were weak," Vegeta leaned his leg forward. Resting his elbow on his knee, he reached up his hand and laid his chin in the crook of his palm.

"But," Vegeta threw out into the air suspensefully, "if you are worthy of your blood—diluted though it may be—then I can spare you long enough to draw out that coward from his hiding place."

"M-my," Gohan coughed out with difficulty, "my father. Is. Dead."

Vegeta narrowed his eyes, "That's what the Namek said." Lifting his chin from his hand, he reached forward and grappled the boy's collar. He tugged Gohan off of the ground within inches of his glower and let a torrent of hot, angry breath pour onto Gohan's face.

"Tell me, mongrel half-breed," Vegeta rumbled lowly, the words resonating in his chest and shaking his whole body. He felt that familiar frothy madness twist inside him in apprehension of what he would say next.

"Did your father turn into a Super Saiyajin?" he whispered almost inaudibly.

Gohan blinked and said not a word. Vegeta's scowl dug deeper down his face.

"Yes," Gohan said flatly.

"How?" This time the word itself could not be heard at all, and the Prince's lips hardly even moved visibly. Still, Gohan guessed what Vegeta had asked and guessed aright.

"Kuririn was killed," Gohan answered hesitantly, "Father was…really angry. He turned gold. And then he made me go away and take…" The image of a cold yet friendly green face flashed before the boy's eyes. His realization slapped Gohan hard in the face.

"And take _Piccolo_ with me…" the name screeched out of his mouth. Gohan felt a power deep inside him explode throughout his body. He howled out a peal of despair and ire and threw Vegeta's hand off his shirt collar. Vegeta jumped back several yards, sensing the boy's rage. Then in some mad bull-rage, Gohan charged headlong toward his foe.

Vegeta saw the move coming and began to sidle to the side when the roar of an oncoming ship approached him from behind and above. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a bulky, plaster-white ship floating in the air with the insignia of Capsule Corp painted on one side. This was nothing worth noting, but on top of a lookout point on the beak of the ship covered with a transparent glass dome stood a strange woman.

By the looks of her bright cerulean hair—as cerulean as the sky— and her ridiculously short, tight dress, Vegeta realized that it was that same impertinent servant-woman from before! The one with the loud mouth who had, without any provocation, begun insulting his honor with her floundering accusations! She was the one he was about to kill when the accursed green man stepped in suddenly.

Vegeta noticed that the woman had some strange device lugged over her shoulder. It seemed to be some sort of gun, similar in appearance to a grenade launcher. Stupid woman. What could she possibly think her weakling planet's silly little toys could do to _him_?

Before Vegeta had time to scoff the stupid woman in his thoughts any longer, Gohan came hurtling forward with his head in front. Vegeta flew backward to avoid the reckless charge, only to be followed by the enraged boy.

Vegeta tossed forward a string of small ki blasts. He was in no mood to kill the boy yet; Vegeta was hoping still that, perhaps, the third-class clown would be more likely to sense that his son was in danger if the battle were to be prolonged a bit. Perhaps, Vegeta hoped, perhaps then Kakarrot would come out to fight.

Before Bulma's father was able to send Goku to Namek, he had to construct a spaceship. In his opinion, it was his most marvelous compilation of inventions yet, and he worked diligently to make every detail of the ship absolutely perfect. Indeed, he even spent whole days laboring over the radio, to make sure an ideal balance was attained between the bass, treble, et cetera.

It would have been impossible to reach such perfection in his invention had his daughter and he not tinkered with many of the ideas in the past. One of those ideas, which they tinkered with for a long time before abandoning it altogether, had been the gravity room. Certainly the gravity room was not all that peculiar or all that original (manipulation of gravity had long been mastered). However, their project—or more like Bulma's project managed to progress beyond a normal gravity room.

To her vast chagrin, Bulma noticed one day that her dresses were getting tighter. Clearly, she had been flitting away too many hours in the lab and was paying the price for it. She decided to go on a diet and couple that with vigorous exercise. But what's diet-and-exercise when it isn't accelerated? She came up with an ingenious plan to increase the effect of her regular exercise routine without having to change a thing—except for the gravity level, of course.

And so Bulma recruited her father to help her with her little project. The two managed to build a trial "Gravi-Gym," as she called it. It was no larger than an average walk-in closet, with enough space for one girl to work off those Turkey Day pounds! The walls were all transparent as were the sliding double doors.

Both outside and inside the Gravi-Gym was a control panel that looked like that of an elevator. There were ten white buttons numbered from "1" to "5.5", and below these was one large red button. The portable gravity room (yes! not only was it reasonably sized and effective—but it was portable!) had been programmed to go up to 5.5 times Earth's gravity; its automatic setting, though, had been a mere "2.5".

After Bulma tested the trial Gravi-Gym, however, she realized that she should never let her father's cat lay on the keyboard while programming a gravity room.

Apparently, after Bulma had set each button in the room to its assigned increase of gravity, the cat had managed to stretch out on the number pad and accidentally tweak with the decimal places in the program.

Bulma placed a testing-sensor, a metal machine that recorded gravity levels, inside the Gravi-Gym. Then, Bulma closed the door to the gym and from the outside pressed the red button to turn on the automatic increase of gravity. From the readings of the testing-sensor, Bulma learned that when the GR read "2.5" Earth's gravity, it in fact meant "250" times Earth's gravity. By that time, though, she had already lost enough weight with her normal routine; she encapsulated the test room and stored it in a drawer in her room.

Bulma knew that the portable Gravi-Gym would finally have a use.

"I've got it!" she shouted in epiphany and raced out of the lobby room of the Capsule Corp Headquarters, up a flight of stairs, into her room and straight toward her study desk. She opened a drawer full of capsules and pulled out one, closed the drawer, and turned around and sprinted toward the hall. Halting suddenly, she ran back toward her desk and yanked open the drawer again. She roved her hand around and picked up another a capsule. She started to make toward the hall again and again stopped suddenly. She grabbed one last capsule and finally headed down the hall, into her personal laboratory.

Bulma tugged on a pair of safety goggles and opened a capsule. The Gravi-Gym popped out. Picking up a welding torch, she slid open the doors of the gym. Throwing herself to her knees, she turned on the torch and out came a tongue of white and blue fire. She directed it slowly across the edges the gym's floor. Having cut through all four edges of the floor, she turned off the torch and set it outside of the gravity room.

Turning around, Bulma caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glare on the gym's transparent walls. She sighed loudly. Her hair was all over the place. Green bruises speckled her lower face: a vestige of Vegeta's hard grip when he grappled her by the mouth. Her dress was ruined with soot and dirt and—

"Eek!" she squealed when she saw that one side was torn, revealing the porcelain skin on the side of her upper thigh. She sighed again and tore off the safety goggles. She tossed them to the side and raked her fingers through her hair wearily. After walking back into the gravity room, she slowly lifted up the floor that she had detached from the walls.

After much dragging and sighing and heaving, she finally maneuvered the floor out of the room and pushed it into a pile of scrap metal at the side of the laboratory. With a deep breath, Bulma slid shut the doors of the Gravi-Gym. She went to the outside control panel and pressed the button "5.5" and then pressed the large red button.

Re-encapsulating the Gravi-Gym, Bulma pulled out another capsule and opened it. Out popped a curious toy: a nerf-gun—upgraded by Bulma Briefs herself in her childhood. She had added mechanic springs and buttons and other upgrades, and in the end she was able to increase the distance that the ammo could reach and the speed at which it could travel substantially.

Bulma inserted the capsule of the Gravi-Gym into the nerf-gun and ran out of the lab, down the stairs, and out of the Capsule Corp Headquarters. She opened the last capsule and out popped a clunky white flying ship. It was more personally sized than some of the others her company had made, but it was still as large as a spacious living room.

Bulma climbed inside of the ship and turned it on with the press of a button. It roared loudly and then took off into the western sky, where bright flashes of light gave away the location of Vegeta and the others. After a little while's flight, she saw through the front windshield the images of Vegeta and Gohan beneath her. She lowered the ship's elevation and then grabbed her nerf-gun. She lunged onto a ladder that led up to a lookout.

Opening the hemispherical dome around the lookout, Bulma slipped onto the roof of the ship. Wind swept through her hair and made her waver in her steps. Regaining her footing, she pulled her nerf-gun though the lookout and closed the dome.

Vegeta. She saw him. He was leaping back, away from Gohan, who bound forward furiously. She lugged the nerf-gun over her shoulder and took aim. The Prince glanced back at her for a split second before he had to evade Gohan's attack. In that millisecond, Bulma felt the Dark Prince's two onyx eyes slice through her.

"_Ice, ice, ice_," she thought to herself, gulping down fearfully, "He's nothing but ice."

Vegeta jumped backward and shot down a volley of ki blasts at Gohan. The Prince was directly below the front of Bulma's ship and seemed distracted by Gohan.

"Perfect," Bulma smiled toothily. Aiming, she pulled the trigger of the nerf-gun and out flung a capsule. It hurtled down toward the Prince, who watched Gohan's reckless evasion of the ki blasts with arms crossed.

The capsule plummeted onto the tip of Vegeta's dark hair. Vegeta glanced up in annoyance, as though a fly were pestering him. Before he even had a chance to react, the capsule broke open and the walls of the gravity room flung around him on all sides. An overwhelming force like nothing he had ever felt before fell onto him, and he felt his body thrown to the dust.

"Ha!" Bulma threw her nerf-gun up victoriously and jumped into the air like a cavorting cheerleader, "Take that Vegeta! Let's see you take on 550 times Earth's gravity!"

Gohan reared to a halt and stared at Vegeta through the transparent walls of the gravity room confusedly. He tossed his eyes up toward the ship.

"Bulma!" he yelled gleefully, grinning as tears cascaded down his cheeks.

"Bulma," he suddenly sobbed, "Piccolo's dead!"

**A/N: **_Thank you for reading! Please share your input!_


	13. Chapter Twelve: Pronto

Chapter Twelve: Pronto

"What?" Bulma's jaw dropped. She tossed the nerf-gun onto the roof of the ship, "He killed Piccolo!"

Gohan nodded weakly and started, "Yes—"

"Wait!" Bulma called out, "Let me go down to meet you! Just a sec, just a sec!" She slipped back into the ship with the toy gun, drove the ship into the ground and jumped out of the cockpit nearly the moment she landed.

"Did you say Piccolo is…" she hesitated, arms akimbo as she stood before the weepy boy.

"Piccolo is dead," Gohan grumbled with his eyes cast askance.

"What do you mean Piccolo's dead?" she bound onto Gohan, grappling the boy by his cheeks with her red, cat-like nails, "If Piccolo's dead, then Kami's dead! If Kami's dead…_no more Dragon Balls_! No more! Then how are we supposed to bring everyone back, huh? How! How!"

Gohan shrunk behind Bulma's clingy grip. Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes.

"I," he squeaked like a mouse, "don't," he tumbled onto his butt and let the tears flow freely, "know!"

"You quit your crying, Gohan!" Bulma blared, kicking the boy on his rump as her eyes glistened with accumulating moisture, "We can't solve anything if we sit on our bums and cry all day!"

"I'm not crying!" Gohan shouted defensively. He sprung to his feet and stealthily wiped away all evidence of tears. Meanwhile, Bulma wrung her hands together, pacing back and forth, thinking, thinking, thinking.

She stopped in her tracks. She tossed her eyes to her side and saw the Gravi-Gym.

"You ass hole!" Bulma screamed with a fist raised, "Now you've screwed everything up!"

Within the Gravi-Gym was a rather quashed Saiyajin flattened across the floor under the weight of a tremendous blanket of force. Veins and muscles throbbed and strained, scrambling madly to keep the Saiyajin's body intact. Sweat tried but failed to trickle down his body in a thousand little beads, but the gravity flattened even that. Instead the perspiration glossed over Vegeta's entire body like a balm that glistened under the sun.

"I think," Bulma turned to Gohan calmly, "Muri will be making a new set of Dragon Balls—with Dende's help. They were discussing it in a meeting earlier. But," she hung her head down sadly, "Muri said outright it would take several years."

"Will the—thing there last that long?" Gohan beckoned toward the Gravi-Gym with a toss of his head.

Bulma shook her head with a defeated sigh, "No. I don't even think it'll last more than a few days. Its batteries aren't that great. In the meantime…"

"In the meantime, what?" Gohan's eyes flashed inquisitively. If anyone had a solution, certainly it had to be the science whiz!

"I don't know," Bulma sank her head even lower. Then she popped it right back up, along with her forefinger.

"Wait!" she grinned, baring her pearly teeth to the world, "In the meantime: we need to make a _much _larger, _much _more powerful Gravity Room. And fast."

"_We _need to?"

"Yes!" Bulma nodded once with satisfaction, closing her eyes and crossing one arm over the other, "_We _need to—me, my dad, and…all the other master scientists in the region!"

"_All _the other master scientists," Gohan uttered disingenuously, scratching his head, "Why? How?"

"Don't ever ask Bulma Briefs 'how'! _How _will it be done? It'll be done Bulma-style," Bulma's eyes glinted roguishly, "As for why—why is easy!" Bulma patted Gohan on the head, "_Why _do I need them? Because if I don't have the help of a collaboration of scientists, _plus _the help of as many technician robots as possible…we'll never make the Gravity Room before those batteries run out," she said flicking her head toward the Gravi-Gym.

"Can't you just replace the batteries?"

"I'd have to turn off the power first."

"Oh," Gohan mumbled hollowly.

"That would not be good."

"No. But," Gohan stammered, "can't you take the—the thing back to your lab and plug something in it to charge it or something, without taking out the batteries?"

"Then I'd have to move the Gravi-Gym," Bulma explained, "And the bottom's cut off. He'd be able to wiggle out through a crack or something."

"Oh."

"That would not be good either."

"No."

"The only choice is…" Bulma stroked her chin, "make a bigger one that'll last longer. Bigger actually is better in this instance!" She smiled at herself. Gohan tried weakly to return the sentiment.

"Oo!" Bulma bounced in place excitedly, "Ideas are whirling in my head like pinwheels! It's just great!"

"Great!" Gohan parroted angrily, "Piccolo's dead! Is that _great_?"

"No," Bulma wandered her eyes away from the sensitive child.

Her smile widened with a scientific sparkle, "But a Gravity Room with as high-tech calibers I have in mind—that still doubles as a spaceship like Goku's did: that's greater than great! We can keep him pinned on the floor _while _simultaneously shuttling him off to some distant reaches of the universe. It's efficient, multi-tasking. Why, it's a veritable innovation in the field! A masterpiece by me!"

For a moment the leaden horrors that burdened her heart were put at ease with a softer spirit, bubbling in her heart with glee. Still, she felt her insides quake with frustration—at herself, at everyone and everything.

They should not have rescued Vegeta on Planet Namek. They should have left him there. Gohan should not have to be here; he was only a boy—a boy who deserved his father to be alive, not dead. Worst of all, Bulma should not be celebrating over scientific trifles when a friend just died.

Piccolo.

"Oh, Piccolo," she sighed inaudibly.

Then Vegeta groaned. Loudly.

Bulma and Gohan leaped off their feet and cringed.

"And that room needs to be made. Now!" Bulma wheeled around and darted toward her ship, "We need to gather all the scientists right away. This Gravity Ship has got to be made pronto."

She froze in her steps, "Hey! That's the perfect name for it: _Pronto_, the Greatest Space Shuttle Ever to Be Made!" At that, she sprinted into her ship.

"You keep an eye on Vegeta, Gohan!" she barked over her shoulder as the ship's doors slid shut. She flew the ship into the sky, back toward the Capsule Corp Headquarters.

Bad things happen, she remembered her father telling her as a girl, you just have to face it, swallow it, and move on.

"I guess that's life," she told herself and continued toward headquarters.

**A/N : **_Thank you for reading! Your reviews are appreciated ! Please continue to share your input!_


	14. Chapter Thirteen: Labor Summons Me

Chapter Thirteen: Labor Summons Me

The city was abuzz. The city was always abuzz. That was why he secluded himself from it (that and otherreasons): it was a place of ceaseless _bizz_ing and merciless buzzing. He found the _bizz_ and buzz of the city to be an indefatigable drain on his un_bizz_ed, unbuzzed concentration.

Everyone has distastes for particular things for no particular reason. Some people hate licorice; others hate insects. He happened to hate people, for their company was as bitter as licorice and their intelligence as petty as a roach's.

The people were certainly being as industrious as roaches today. Peering through his digitally enhanced telescope, he could espy the streets brimming with them. The little roaches scuttled here and shuffled there—always with not-so-bright looks on their faces.

Sure, the people were always up to somescheme to deceive themselves into self-importance. However, today, they radiated an especial confidence. They banded together on street corners with genuine concern knitted on their brows. Men in uniforms directed human traffic with hands, signs, and flags while others shouted over the mob through cones. They all seemed to gravitate toward a massive screen built into the side of a skyscraper to watch a news station.

He sighed uninterestedly.

"Some damned idolof theirs again, I'm supposing." He pushed with his feet and his chair rolled away from the telescope. The chair crashed to a halt at a metallic rectangular bar stretching across the length of his cramped laboratory. The bar was covered entirely with white buttons—some flashed orange, others flashed red.

Immediately, he threw his fingers onto the gargantuan keyboard. He had spider-legs for fingers. They were long arching fingers, with distinct joints and thin sticks in between. They wildly whipped across the keyboard, swift and precise as if demon possessed.

After a while, he grew bored with his work and vexed with curiosity over what the roaches were watching on the skyscraper. He typed on his keyboard, and a large blank computer screen flashed on.

The youthful face of a female reporter, with a tad bit too much makeup as usual, stretched across the wall.

"We have heard few reports explaining the Phenomena occurring in the wilderness adjacent to West City or of the sudden vacancy of the city itself and all neighboring areas, including Orange Star City," she articulated solemnly, "According to one anonymous source, there may be a military experiment taking place. This would then account for the scenes we have just shown, showing numerous officials in municipal, state, and military uniforms escorting stragglers out of the streets. However, there have also been incoming reports that world leaders have called for a priority summit, with the West City Phenomena as the key t—"

With a few taps of his spider-leg fingers, the screen flashed again to another channel and then another, and then—Stop.

"This is a Global Summons! I repeat: this is a Global Summons!" a beautiful but nonetheless grimy woman spoke. Tiny green bruises surrounded her mouth; her lips were bright claret; her hair burned blue.

"I am Bulma Briefs, daughter and colleague of Dr. Briefs, and Associate President of Capsule Corporation. Once again, this is a Global Summons!

"I am sure you are thinking, 'If this is a _global _summons, why is it being aired on as eccentric a station as _S_cientists _T_oday?' That is because this summons is calling for you—scientists of our globe! I am sure you have been hearing of the West City Phenomena; those in more cautious cities might be witnessing this summons in an underground bunker—certainly those in and around West City itself. Capsule Corporation has been recruited in accord with the will of all our global leaders to lead the _Pronto Project_ in reaction to the Phenomena.

"Due to misfortunes, we are lacking in numbers. We need engineers! We need scientists! We need you! We are calling for all capable, documented scientists close to the Capsule Corp Headquarters to immediately come to our facilities to contribute to the _Pronto Project_. The _Project _is our globe's united effort to resolve the issues emerging as a result of the West City Phenomena. If you are unable to come here without risking your well being, please do not feel obliged. However, if you can: please, come! Please, be aware that you will be fully recognized by your country, your people, your leaders, and your world—and you will be generously paid upon the successful completion of the _Pronto Project_.

"For safety and the maintenance of order, I cannot disclose to you the nature of the _Project _or of the details concerning the West City Phenomena. Know, however, that you will be wholly informed upon arrival and confirmation into the _Project_. Also, all your physical needs will be provided for during your—"

He pressed a button. The sound went mute. He watched her lips go round and then stretch out with each phoneme. He stroked at the tip of his chin and then slunk his fingertips up to his lips.

He thought to himself, pressing his chapped lips as he mumbled indistinct syllables. He suddenly jumped to his feet.

"Yes, of course! This is perfect! Perfect! This falls into place! This binds all the plans together! Perfect, perfect!"

And then he darted out of the lab.

It was not that he cared about the globe. In fact, he hated the globe. It was, after all, the mothernest of the roaches. He much preferred to bury himself in technology. It was not that he cared about technology either. In fact, he was at times annoyed by its dull yet incessant hum, which gnawed at his ears like a slow-moving poison. Technology, however, at least had a use. It was economical. It was efficient. And it helped him display his budding genius to its fullest.

That and that alone held the pedestal in his mind: genius. _His _genius.

Ever since the fall of his last project due to the devices of a certain boy-roach, he had little hope. He would have to content himself to common genius—the genius that invented "encapsulation," the genius that began "encapsulating" on a massive scale. Basically, he had to content himself with mundane inventions, aimed to "help" rather than "create."

Although he always led the field in whatever scientific pursuit he chose, he could not help but feel suffocated. Why make an airplane, when one can invent a way to fly by himself?

He had grown sick of it. His new project, then, was a lifesaver. Before he could even begin, he had to collect a large amount of data through years of observation. This required patience, waiting, and dawdling. But the day eventually came, and the project began.

Then it came to a screeching halt.

It all went terribly wrong.

He had to put it off for a long time.

Something went terribly, terribly wrong with the programming of the inventions. He needed to reformat, recalculate. Yet no matter how hard he tried, he could not discover a proper solution. Then, as if sent by God, the youthful face of Bulma Briefs flickered onto his computer screen. He knew. He just knew.

Scientific journals were brimming with material on Bulma Brief's every innovation. Even he could not deny her obvious talent. He could not resist the temptation to use her genius to augment his own, especially now that she was opening her doors to all documented scientists. Perhaps he could get her to find a solution for him and then—yes, surely then his inventions would be complete. Then the world would finally acknowledge his infinite and creative genius.

He contemplated all this as his ship landed softly in front of the Capsule Corp Headquarters. After securing the ship, he walked out at his full height. He was a gangly old man with an ever-present sneer on his face and an ogre-like stoop of his head.

The doors of the Capsule Corp Headquarters slid open, and he strode into the lobby. Quiet chatter echoed in the room as a group of scientists—with lab coats and safety goggles— ambled into an elevator.

Then he heard it. The _bizz_. The buzz. He peered over his shoulder longingly, through the door at the ship, which could instantly shuttle him away from the noisy industry of the roaches.

The clicking of high heels caught the edge of his ears. The clicking stopped.

"Can I help you?"

He whirled his head forward and saw the same cherry-lipped, blue-haired beauty. Like the others, she wore a lab coat over what appeared to be a rather revealing dress. Safety goggles settled securely over her eyes, and her hair was pulled back in a bow.

"I am looking for an office," he shifted his hands nervously and scratched at his elbows, hugging himself slightly, "Uh…a place to discuss—business with a superior in this corporation."

The woman nodded uncertainly.

"Follow me!" she grinned and turned brusquely around, pacing into a hallway. He followed, his arms and hands creeping around his body nervously.

"_Labor me vocat_," he mumbled to himself while walking down the hall. Bulma turned her eyes to him curiously. He smirked at her with a grim superiority.

"I'm deducing, then, that yours was not a Classical education?" He smirked with a brow raised cockily. He threw up a hand to his face and fumbled at his lips with the bulbous tips of his spider-leg fingers. His eyes flung wildly around in thought, paying no heed to his surroundings.

As the two approached a corner of the hallway, he had become so lost in thought he nearly rammed into the wall. At the last moment, he reared sharply around the corner, bumping into Bulma. They glanced at each other. He let the wrinkled skin on his face sag without expressing his thoughts. They continued to walk.

"It is Latin," he revealed with a wet and breathy grunt, his fingers on his lips again, "It means _labor summons me_. You summoned me, didn't you?"

Bulma frowned a bit and stopped in her tracks. He stopped, too. They stood motionless in a narrow white hallway, facing each other. Then Bulma's eyes flashed excitedly. She beamed.

"Oh!" she piped cheerfully, "You must've received that 'global summons' I sent out, no?" She tilted her head to the side. He nodded once abruptly and hesitated for a moment. Overcoming his reluctance, he stuck out a hand. Bulma shook it warmly and smiled. He swallowed down hard the misanthropy brewing inside him and simply grinned back at her.

"I guess I should introduce myself," Bulma chuckled lightly, "I'm Bulma Briefs, Head Scientist of the _Pronto Project_. I was born and raised in the Capsule Corp facilities, so if you have any questions or concerns: come to me!"

He nodded in acknowledgment.

"Yes, yes, of course," he grumbled, squeezing her hand a little before finally releasing it, "I'm from the North City. People—well, not people but everyone I know—they all just call me Dr. Gero."

**A/N: **_Thank you for reading! Please share your input!_


	15. Chapter Fourteen: Regroup and Replan

Chapter Fourteen: Regroup and Replan

No.

He would not slip out of consciousness.

He refused.

First: he would not admit defeat to that blue-haired servant woman, whose throat he was bent on crushing into jelly.

Second: he would not return to the white abyss that was his sleep in order to be annoyed by that accursed imp again.

Yet as hard as he tried, Vegeta could not move. He felt like a worm slowly being squashed beneath a giant invisible thumb. The moment he quit tensing his muscles and straining against the force, it would undoubtedly compress his whole body into itself.

And so he struggled fruitlessly. The gravity was squeezing him inch by inch against his crumbling wall of resistance. It was so strong that he could not expand his chest and lungs to breathe; if he did not get out of this little prison soon, he would pass out. With his guard down, his body would collapse—not that this would kill him, but it would certainly damage him in ways his Saiyajin regeneration could not restore.

He had to find a channel of escape before he ran out of breath. For most that would mean the countdown was near an end. However, Vegeta was an elite warrior; he had long been prepared for such circumstances.

To his great fortune, Nappa had trained him to hold his breath far longer than the average Saiyajin Elite—which meant even longer than the average human being. The method Nappa used to train the infant Vegeta was less than pleasant. Whenever the boy had his guard down, Nappa would seize him by the tail and dunk him into a tub of water. Regardless of the boy's desperate thrashing and pleas, Nappa would pin him into the water for minutes and minutes. Naturally, Vegeta soon mastered the ability to hold his breath.

He could take his time then. There was no rush. He constricted his muscles, revealing throbbing veins and toned skin, drenched with beads of sweat.

"Think," he silently commanded himself, "Think! Think! Think!"

All the while, Gohan squirmed outside. He stood in one place, shifted his footing, grew impatient, fidgeted, and then jumped on top of the Gravi-Gym. Then, even there, he was not content. He leaped back to the ground and threw his eyes around his surroundings.

Now that all the other Z Fighters had been killed, Gohan had not allowed himself to think. If he stayed still and silent, he could not help but fall into thought. He feared this more than anything. For the last three days, since his return to Earth, he had thrown himself into his schoolwork. It served as a distraction. Now, though, as he stood guard over a strange invention, what could he do but think? And what could he think about but death and despair?

And so he began to stalk in a diligent circuit around the gym, lifting his feet in a goose march. His brows bent down in a severe expression. His eyes shifted suspiciously between the image of the city on the horizon and the image of the Saiyajin Prince groveling helplessly beneath the invisible force.

It had become too difficult even to groan. Vegeta's throat was contracting from the force of the gravity. He scraped his fingers into the dirt, exerting his pain and frustration. Slowly, his nails dug into the ground. They inched deeper and deeper.

Deeper and deeper.

Millimeter by millimeter.

Centimeter by centimeter.

Then, on reaching passed a certain point, the tips of his fingers slipped rapidly into the earth. So long as they were underground, he could wiggle them back and forth freely, completely unburdened by the invisible force. It seemed that the increase of gravity only reached to a certain extent. Passed that, he was free.

Downward, he had to plunge himself downward. Time was trickling out of his hands like grains of sand.

"Down! Go down!" he yelled in his thoughts.

Gohan finished yet another circuit around the Gravi-Gym. He halted in place and watched over the city line with a sigh. In the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a dull glow coming from within the Gravi-Gym.

The ground rumbled under his feet. He pivoted his hips to look fully at the Gravi-Gym. Vegeta was no longer inside. Instead, there was a deep hole tunneling into the ground where the Prince once lay.

"Oh no," Gohan dashed to the Gravi-Gym. He pressed a large red button, and the gravity inside the gym returned to normal. Sliding the doors open, he entered the gym to investigate.

"Where'd he go?" Gohan wondered to himself, stepping charily toward the tunnel in the ground. He stooped his head downward, closer to the hole, and narrowed his eyes.

From behind, there came a deafening boom. Before Gohan could turn around, he was caught in a headlock by an arm of iron. The arm lifted him off his feet and yanked him out of the Gravi-Gym. As the arm squeezed his throat, he felt his head begin to swell from lack of air. He floundered desperately, swinging his arms and legs about. Then, another arm promptly pulled his body against a well-toned chest—no matter how hard his limbs thrashed, he could not free himself.

Gohan was pinned.

He tried to scream, but the arm only choked him with every attempt.

He let his rage overflow and exuded a burning cocoon of ki. This only made the chest vibrate against his body with laughter.

"Now," growled a low voice. It was a deep scraping, Gohan thought, like the chafing of a nail against a metal sheet. The growl tickled not only the sensations of the ears, but now it took shape against Gohan's cheek. As the voice slowly slipped into the air, hot breath rhythmically teemed onto the side of the boy's face. He could hear the quiet smacking of wet lips as they spoke against his ear.

"Now," the voice repeated, and the arm loosened its grip around Gohan's throat, "do not think you can fight me, boy. I can kill you right here with the slightest shift of my arm. No struggle will save you. So do not bother.

"I am going to ask you a few questions; I expect you to answer. If I suspect that you are lying, I will kill you. If you manage to escape me, I will kill every man, woman, and child I can find on this planet. Do you understand?"

Gohan nodded as much as he could with the arm around his neck.

"Good," said the voice.

"Question number one," it continued, "Did that father of yours really die?"

Vegeta had been the perfect warrior, the strongest being of the strongest race in the entire universe. Of course, that had all been before he fought _Kakarrot_. After that clown, the Prince felt a constant sinking in the pit of his stomach, as if _something_ were pulling him down into an abyss of uncertainty.

By anyone else, this _something_ would be called doubt, but Vegeta had no name for it, for never before in his life had he felt it. It was a stain on his honor; it had to be erased, especially now that he was immortal. How could the Prince of All Saiyajins be an immortal and yet not the strongest in the universe?

He had to return to the pedestal of his confidence. He had to know once again that he was the mightiest of all. Once he was sure of this, he could return to his old self and would no longer be plagued by his flurry of emotions and frustrations. For now, though, Vegeta had to content himself with imitation. He forced himself to think as he did before. And so with cold calculation, he thought of all the possibilities:

Perhaps, Kakarrot was not dead. Perhaps, he was on Earth. He could easily hide his ki. No. Kakarrot was a fool, but not foolish enough to forget that Vegeta was on Earth and would undoubtedly search for him, ruining "innocent" lives in the process.

Perhaps, then, Kakarrot was alive, but chose to stay out in space. To what purpose? According to the green man, Namek blew up. Perhaps, Kakarrot took a ship to another planet.

Perhaps, Vegeta could assume that the green man had lied and Namek had not blown up. But Vegeta knew from the start of the fight with Freeza that the destruction of Namek was inevitable, especially after the Genki Dama went tumbling into the planet's surface.

Thus far, then, what did Vegeta have? Namek was destroyed. Kakarrot either died in the explosion of the planet or escaped with a ship to travel to another planet.

"Do not make this harder than this has to be," Vegeta hissed into Gohan's ear after the boy did not respond. Honestly, Vegeta did not really need the boy's answer for this question, but it was a good starting point.

"Yes," Gohan answered faintly while a tear rolled out the corner of his eye.

"Question number two," Vegeta started immediately after Gohan spoke, "Freeza is dead?"

"Yes."

"And he killed him?"

Gohan hesitated, not sure to whom each pronoun was referring. He managed to deduce what Vegeta meant and answered mechanically, "Yes."

Gohan felt the muscles in Vegeta's arm tense and pull closer to his neck.

"Kakarrot killed Freeza…" Vegeta grumbled. Thinking it another question, Gohan answered, "Yes."

The arm squeezed around Gohan's neck, and he felt his consciousness waver on the edge of black sleep.

Vegeta knew that as a Saiyajin and as an immortal, he could not have taken too long to recover after he was "killed" the second time by Freeza. Only a few days could have passed since the fight, yet already he was on Earth. It would have taken at least a month to travel by space ship. The reason, then, he was already here: the Earth's Dragon Balls.

"I need the Dragon Balls," he stated flatly. He felt the boy wither in his grip.

"The ones on Namek have…" the boy mumbled, "died. And the ones on Earth…"

"Yes?" Vegeta squeezed Gohan's neck slightly.

"You killed Piccolo—"

"No, brat, you killed him," Vegeta corrected. Gohan squirmed a little and then spat out bitterly, "Piccolo's dead, which means Kami's dead, which means our Dragon Balls on Earth are dead, too."

Son of a bitch.

Vegeta's cool calculation whipped away in a second, and a flash of red rage seized his face. He hugged his arm closer to his body, throttling Gohan until the boy turned blue.

"Why?" Vegeta barked, growing harsher and harsher, louder and louder, "Why the _fuck _did you kill—"

"No," his thoughts suddenly commanded him. He loosened his headlock, and Gohan wheezed for air.

"Stop," Vegeta thought to himself, "Stop and think."

"Question," Vegeta spoke into Gohan's ear, "How did the green man, you, and I transport to Earth?"

Gohan wrinkled his brows as he panted and panted.

"The Dragon Balls on Earth," he finally responded. He could hear the noisily quiet clockwork of Vegeta's mind.

"What's he thinking?" Gohan wondered, "What's he planning?"

"That doesn't seem right," Vegeta reflected silently, "While on Namek, I had two sets of rivals for the Dragon Balls. First was Freeza, who would have wished for immortality. Second were the weaklings, who—I assume—would have wished to resurrect their lost warriors and the dead Nameks."

Gohan tried to wiggle out of Vegeta's grip, but Vegeta only squeezed harder. It seemed to be an automatic reaction, for when Gohan glanced up at the Prince, Vegeta's eyes were glazed over with detached thought.

"The Dragon Balls on Earth were gathered and used to transport us, but why would they transport me?" Vegeta mulled, "The weaklings are brainless sheep who become as rapacious as wolves once their shepherd is lost. Kakarrot was that shepherd. If he died—or if they thought he had died—I doubt they would have included me in their wish, especially now that I'm immortal.

"No, they must have used a large, sweeping statement like 'transport _everyone _on Namek to Earth,' which inadvertently transported me. But why would they need to say everyone? That implies many, not few.

"There should only have been Kakarrot, Freeza, me, the brat, and the green man on Namek—the cue-ball had been killed. So only five in all—and only three to transport, two if they excluded me. Of course, _everyone _is easier to say than listing two names…but still, _everyone_ usually implies many. And the only reason there would be many on Namek…is if the Nameks had been resurrected. Somehow, I think, they managed to resurrect the Nameks. Which means…"

"Someone's coming!" Gohan alerted the Prince with a hoarse whisper. Two trivial kis lingered not too far behind Vegeta. The Prince glanced over his shoulder to see a dot—a truck—creeping onto the edge of the valley.

"Alright, brat," Vegeta spoke fiercely into Gohan's ear, "I did not get out of the Gravi-Gym. You've been keeping guard. If you say anything stupid, I'll be obliged to kill them both and you."

He threw the boy onto his feet and returned inside the Gravi-Gym, closing the doors behind him. He sprawled onto the ground and strained his muscles, as if the increase of gravity was still on.

The truck drove up to Gohan. A scientist in over-alls and safety goggles jumped out of the driver's side; another came out of the other side. The latter moved to the back of the truck and slid out a ramp. He started to cautiously pull down a strange looking machine from the trunk.

The other scientist walked up to Gohan with a smile.

"Gohan?" The scientist tilted his head inquisitively.

"Yes?" the boy answered, feeling his heart beat within him and hoping that Vegeta would not be overcome by some sanguinary whim.

"Dr. Lowry and I were sent over by Miss Briefs, to see how everything's going with you," the scientist explained.

"Oh!" Gohan forced himself to smile, "Everything's fine! Guard duty's pretty easy!"

The scientist nodded and beckoned to the machine the other man was pulling toward the Gravi-Gym.

"We were able to find this," he slapped his hand on the machine as the other scientist pushed it passed him, "It's a portable charger. It'll lengthen the time it takes for the batteries to die on the Gravi-Gym."

"Uh…" Gohan wanted to laugh bitterly, but he continued to smile, "Cool!"

"Unfortunately," the scientist sighed, "Miss Briefs had been experimenting with improving batteries when she was dabbling at this experiment, which means she had to make a charger _just _for this individual type of batteries. When she abandoned the project, she abandoned completing the charger, too—so it won't be nearly as useful as it could have been. It'll only add on a few extra hours."

"Yeah…well," Gohan stalled, "I'm sure it'll be enough for whatever Bulma's planning," then his eyes glinted curiously, "What is she planning anyway? She just left here without explaining herself."

"Ah!" the scientist beamed, delighted at the thought of sharing his passion with another, "It's great that you asked! She's having us—"

Gohan threw his hands up in realization.

"Wait!" he exclaimed at the last moment, "_Don't _tell me! I don't wanna know!"

"Er…"

"Let it be a surprise!"

"Alright…" the scientist shrugged. By now, the other scientist had managed to slide the charger adjacent to the Gravi-Gym. He bent over in a measly attempt to lift the charger, but quickly shouted out to the scientist in front Gohan:

"Hey! Aizawa! Help me with this, will yuh?"

Both scientists quickly went to work. They lifted the charger on top of the Gravi-Gym, where the batteries were held, opened a panel and screwed out this and plugged in that.

"Well," said Aizawa, rubbing his hands together with a feeling of accomplishment, "the charger's plugged in," he walked toward his truck with Dr. Lowry at his side.

"Once the batteries die, the machine'll use the charger." Aizawa turned to Gohan.

"Great…" Gohan sighed. Maybe that charger would have helped ten minutes ago.

"Keep your eye on that guy!" Dr. Lowry smiled while jumping into the passenger's seat of the truck.

"Will do!" Gohan waved a hand warmly, "Good luck!"

"Yeah, you, too!" Aizawa waved back and entered the truck, "Bye!"

The truck roared on and turned around. Aizawa's arm stuck out of the window, waving at Gohan.

"Say hi to Bulma for me!" the boy shouted.

"Yeah, bye!" he heard a faint response grow fainter, as the truck faded into the distance.

"Bye," Gohan whispered. Immediately, he felt the looming ki of Vegeta creep behind him. Gohan bound back, twirling around in a fighting stance with a scowl.

"I should kill you for that," sneered the Prince.

"For what?" Gohan threw back, cocking his fists, "I didn't do anything."

"You prevented them from revealing a plot against me," Vegeta breathed out, crossing his arms indifferently.

"You never said I was supposed to find those out for you."

"No…" Vegeta argued with himself in a soft whisper; his eyes stared into the dust, "No, I shouldn't kill him yet. He may still be of use." He looked to Gohan.

"The Nameks were resurrected and transported to Earth, weren't they?" he asked. Gohan went stiff, and his fists fell down to his side. He opened his mouth to respond but found himself gawking stupidly.

"…No," he managed to say.

"That's what I thought," Vegeta smirked, "How was it done? Do you get more than one wish with the Dragon Balls on Earth?"

"I don't know…"

"Where are they?"

"Who?"

"Don't play games, boy!" Vegeta's ki flickered dangerously, "I am shrewder than you could ever hope to be! Where?" He flourished a fist.

Gohan trembled, but swallowing down his fears, he retorted, "W-why do you—you…why do you need to know where? I told you, they aren't here."

"Answer me," Vegeta's glower went dark.

"I—I don't know where," Gohan stuttered, "I've been at home, near Orange Star City. That's miles away. I don't know what Bulma's been doing with them."

Bulma. Vegeta narrowed his eyes.

"Who is Bulma?" he asked.

"…Um…" Gohan hesitated. It would not be good to have Vegeta fully informed.

"Just some…" Gohan drawled a response, "guy. Just some guy. He owns lots of…land…and is—was friends with my dad."

Vegeta snorted, "Bulma's a foolish name for a man."

"_Vegeta _is awfully close to _vegetable_," Gohan shot back, making Vegeta's frown fall deeper into his face.

"No," the Prince soothed himself in his thoughts, "Spare him. He can still be of use."

"How is this Bulma-man associated with the Nameks?" he questioned.

"He agreed to keep the Nameks on his land."

"Take me there."

"Where?"

"Damn it, boy!"

"Alright!" Gohan threw his hands up, "I'll take you there!"

"Huh—your answer to where the Nameks were, was 'you do not know because you do not know what Bulma's been doing with them,'" Vegeta observed, "That suggests that you do not know where Bulma's land is. So how could you take me there?"

"No…" Gohan stalled, "I know where the land is. I just don't know whether or not she—"

"She?" Vegeta chuckled, "_She_ and not _he_?"

Gohan cried out hastily before anything further could transpire, "I don't know if he's moved them is all! Alright?"

"Alright…" Vegeta shrugged, "then lead the way."

"This way," Gohan uttered, bouncing into the air and flying away from the city. After a few seconds, he realized that Vegeta was not following. He glanced down at the Saiyajin Prince, who had his arms crossed and his chin raised haughtily.

"Really? _That _way?" the Prince called out disdainfully, "How strange, considering that while I was leveling those buildings back in the city, I sensed a large collection of some rather peculiar kis, uncannily reminiscent of those on Namek."

"Think quick!" Gohan heard his thoughts chanting. He scrambled to find some excuse and ended up laughing loudly.

"Are you kidding?" he howled, "You think _those _kis are Nameks? That's just a bunch of soldiers!"

The Prince arched a brow high onto his forehead, "Soldiers?"

"Well," Gohan shouted down, still in the air, "you caused quite a riot in the city! Of course, they would call out soldiers! And soldiers are stronger than average Earthling citizens…which is why they seemed stronger."

Vegeta leaned his head down, shading his face from Gohan's examination.

"I did not say _stronger_, I said _stranger_," the Prince mumbled under his breath.

He felt a growing urge to crush this fibbing little brat.

"No," he thought, ""I had sensed those 'soldiers' before I attacked the city…and the brat's ki was far away at that time. There was no way of him knowing who was there and what the city was doing in reaction to my attack. He only came after I flew _out _of the city. He's making things up and trying to direct me away from the city. I can only conclude then that those kis _are _the Nameks and the city _is _the Nameks' hideout.

"I misjudged; I thought he could be useful. But he can't. He's lying through his teeth. Like that clown father of his, he won't cooperate. In redirecting me, all he's really doing is challenging me."

Vegeta smirked grimly.

"Challenge accepted," he hissed quietly to himself. He lifted his head and locked eyes with the boy. Soon after, he flew up to Gohan's side.

"Take me to Bulma's land," he said.

**A/N: **_Thank you for reading! Please review!_


	16. Chapter Fifteen: Triumvirate of Science

Chapter Fifteen: Triumvirate of Science

"Dr. Gero? _The _Dr. Gero—the one who contributed that article to _STD_?"

The gangly old man raised a brow. Although he expressed no emotion, his cold blinking and delayed response communicated a slight resentment. He sucked at the flaking end of his thumb nail and then stammered, "I—I don't have a sexually tra—"

"Oh, Kami forgive me!" Bulma slapped a hand on Dr. Gero's shoulder as her chest hiccupped with laughter, "No, no, no! _STD_: _S_cience _T_oday's _D_igest!"

Dr. Gero jerked his shoulder back, shrugging off Bulma's friendly hand as if it were leprous.

"Yes, well," Dr. Gero threw his eyes to his feet and took one awkward step back, creating greater distance between Bulma and him, "they need to come up with a better acronym."

As his eyes scrutinized every speck on the floor, he chanced upon Bulma's shoes. They added at least two inches of a bright cherry fashion statement to her full height. He could not help but note how well they matched with her lips. Then he could not help but note how lithe her milky white legs were, subtly curving like elongated bass clefs until they reached the knees. Above that, to his immeasurable annoyance, a lab coat wrapped itself protectively around her thighs.

In her line of work, Bulma had come to accept the intellectually superior, socially inferior genius as the norm. It was still creepy, though. As the old man eyeballed her where she stood, she felt herself convulse with repulsion. She tried to shrug it off. Exaggerated laughter rolled out of her mouth.

"Ha ha! You got that right!" Bulma tooted in reply to Dr. Gero's comment (though, she had no recollection of what that comment was anymore). She turned sharply forward, away from the old man's prying eyes, and rushed down the white hallway toward a metal door.

Once the woman's legs ripped away from his sight, Dr. Gero still stood in place. He could not remember at what point he transitioned from examining a woman's fine legs to staring blankly in all consuming thought. Regardless, he stood. And stared. After loitering, plunged in thought, he glanced up to see no one in front of him.

"Hey!" Bulma shouted from the end of the hall. Dr. Gero tossed his head to his right to see the woman scientist hovering in front of a doorway.

"You coming?" Bulma chuckled nervously. Dr. Gero's eyes widened in fleeting surprise, and he scuttled down the hall in a half-pace, half-jog to Bulma's side.

Bulma inputted a code in a side panel. The metal door slid open.

"But to answer your question!" Dr. Gero lifted a finger, unveiling a wondrous discovery, "Yes, I am that very same Dr. Gero. I submitted an article a few months back."

Bulma smiled with her eyes at Dr. Gero. They lingered at the threshold of the door for a moment.

"I thought so," Bulma chirped, "You know, your outlook on bionics' applicability to artificial intelligence is extremely…_intriguing_. It's too bad that the digest cut out so much." She tickled her chin thoughtfully, stepping into the room behind the door

Dr. Gero followed her into the room. It was as large as an auditorium and as overrun with cement as a mechanic's shop. Yet with the near twenty scientists and engineers buzzing back and forth with tools in hand, it was doubtlessly a laboratory. Four cement walls surrounded the sprawling lab, rising high and straight and connecting to two windows, which comprised the ceiling. The windows slanted sharply in a triangular shape. Beams of clear sunlight brightened the room, and a grid of shade darkened the floor in thin strips where metal frames above crisscrossed through the windows.

Bulma strode to the right, her heels clinking on the cement. She stopped halfway into the room. In front of her was a pile of scrap metal with crude scaffolding erecting the pieces into a dome.

"Well," Dr. Gero sniveled, wiping at his nose with a knuckle as he walked to the metal dome, "They had to cut out half my article to make room for their seven page opus on _your_ latest kitchen room knick-knack. What was it that issue?"

His brows sunk low on his face while he probed the dome, "The automatic whisk-cleaner or something of that nature?"

Bulma placed her hands on her hips as she huffed out a breath. Several mechanics were torching a piece of metal into a gap on the dome. With a flip of her hand, she began to direct some of the mechanics in this direction or that, or toward this tool or that.

"Ha ha!" she chuckled, turning her smiling face toward Dr. Gero, "What can I say? Whisk-cleaners sell!"

Dr. Gero sighed breathily.

Pressing his lips with yellow fingernails, he grumbled, "I expect just as much from the masses."

"Um…" Bulma cocked her head to the side, uncertain whether or not to take offense.

She shrugged it off, "Well, have you got confirmed into the _Pronto Project _yet? You could really contribute!"

Dr. Gero shook his head once.

"That is why you're escorting me to the office."

"No need!" Bulma stuck her hand out, and again the two shook hands—Bulma firmly, Dr. Gero awkwardly, "You've been confirmed right now! By me! They had your picture in that article of yours, too, you know, so I know that you're the 'real thing.' Let's skip all those paper procedures…we're too short on time. I'll have you fill them out later tonight. Right now, let's just get to business. This is the lab."

She proffered her hand before the shoddy metal dome, "And this is the _Pronto Project_!"

"Interesting," he muttered, tugging his hand out of Bulma's grip.

He turned his eyes toward the dome again and uttered, "What is it?"

"It is a very, very, very nascent Gravity Room," Bulma lifted her chin in pride, "so if it looks at all—unrefined, that's because we literally _just _started."

"Unrefined is not the right word for it," Dr. Gero snorted, "Barbaric is more like it."

"What can I say?" Bulma shrugged, her voice lilting, "We started five minutes before you walked in."

"And," Dr. Gero began and then stopped suddenly. He frowned to himself and shook his head and mumbled incoherently.

"Might I ask?" He rotated toward Bulma with a pathetic excuse for a smile.

"Ask anything you like!" Bulma piped.

"How does this tie in with the West City Phenomena?"

"Excellent question!" Bulma began, "But you have to promise not to tell anyone else. The governments all over the world have made this _Project _confidential; any exposure of what is taking place here will result in charges of nothing less than treason. That's basically what the papers are saying that you'll be filling out later: don't tell anyone about anything that takes place here and don't use any of the technology inside this lab independently without authorization."

"Without authorization?"

"Right."

Dr. Gero laughed internally and thought to himself, "Ha! Oh well! It isn't like I haven't broken the law before. I'll be using all of this technology any damned way I please!"

"I promise," Dr. Gero simpered to Bulma.

"Great!" Bulma nodded. She paced to a table lined up against a wall and picked up a clipboard with a pack of lined yellow sheets of paper. They crinkled with each step she took, obviously weighed down by an excess of ink on each page.

Returning to Dr. Gero's side, Bulma handed him the clipboard. The old man's eyes studied each page, the pupils flitting side to side as he read the blueprints.

"You intend to keep someone pinned down with this GR?" he questioned while pressing his lips, "The gravity settings are ridiculously high. How strong is the subject supposed to be?"

"The strongest in the universe," Bulma whispered lowly.

He knew it! He knew that "West City Phenomena" was nothing more than the recklessness of that monkey-tailed brat who had spoiled his beautiful plot those many years ago! He knew it had to be that blasted _Goku _again.

"But," he heard the word echo in his thoughts as he leered sidelong at Bulma with mounting suspicion, "you would think Bulma would be on Goku's side. Why would she want to trap him in a GR—not only with increased gravity but also with combatant robotics to inhibit any attempt at escape? _And _all of this inside a spacecraft with an absurdly powerful rocketing capability? What is she up to? Has she turned against that brat? If so, this could be the greatest single opportunity for success in my lifetime!"

"Are you alright?" he heard the sweet sting of Bulma's voice pierce his ears. Then he realized that he was beaming maniacally with a hopeful glint twinkling in his scheming eyes. He scratched the back of his head.

"Yes, yes," he coughed uneasily, "I am just so…excited to finally get to work with you, especially on such a challenging project."

"And I'm excited, too!" Bulma exclaimed in her singsong voice, patting Dr. Gero's back as she leaned over to glance at the clipboard. Dr. Gero wanted to shudder. Human contact. Human proximity. How nauseating.

"But guess what, not only do we have to fulfill all these listed requirements," she waved a finger over the clipboard, "but we also have to finish it within a week."

"Impossible," Dr. Gero stated flatly, hooking his gaze with Bulma's.

"That's when the batteries and charger'll die out."

"Batteries and charger," Dr. Gero repeated. He wondered if it were some layman term with which he was unfamiliar.

Deciding otherwise, he continued, "The batteries and charger for what will run out?"

"I can only answer that by disclosing information that the world governments made us swear not to expose," Bulma gravely explained, "Again you'll be doing this when you fill out all those papers. But for now—do you swear?"

Dr. Gero raised his right hand.

"On my honor," he swore.

"Good!" Bulma smiled again while he let his hand fall down to his side, "The West City Phenomena was nothing less than an alien attack."

_He knew it! It _was_ Goku!_

"An attack by an alien called a _Saiyajin_."

_Well, he didn't know that! But that would certainly explain a lot!_

"He had recently been in a conflict abroad—in space, I mean. He was injured, and so we had him hospitalized in the clinic at Capsule Corp Headquarters. When he woke up, he started attacking civilians. A friend of mine managed to lure him out of the city."

_A friend of hers? She had a friend who could take on Goku? According to the data that the ladybug had recorded, all of Goku's possible competitors had died when fighting that troll-haired alien—except for the boy and the bald man. But the boy and the bald man were no match for Goku._

"Unfortunately, that friend…passed away."

_Well, duh! No one could take on Goku!_

"But! I had made a miniature gravity room over a year back and managed to trap the Saiyajin inside. So now I have another friend, a boy named Gohan, watching over the Saiyajin while we make the _Pronto Project_!"

_That didn't sound right at all! That would mean it was the bald man who died fighting Goku and the boy who was watching over the miniature gravity room. But wasn't the boy Goku's son? If so, wouldn't the boy be conspiring with Goku?_

"Unfortunately, I hadn't made the batteries in the gravity room last more than about six to seven days. I did, however, make a charger for the batteries and had a couple scientists plug it in about two hours back. Still, the charger only adds about six more hours of power."

_No. It couldn't be Goku. It had to be someone else. But who could take on Goku? Well, the arrival of the troll-haired alien certainly showed that there is other life out there in the universe. Perhaps someone else had come?_

"So," Bulma pulled the clipboard out of Dr. Gero's grasp, "we have about seven days and four hours left—and the clock's counting down. Me and my father have decided to divide the labor on the gravity room into three parties."

She waved her hand before the metal dome, "Right here in front of us is my father's—Dr. Brief's party. Though, he isn't here right now…" Bulma roamed her eyes throughout the laboratory. As one worker passed by with a heavy drill in both hands, she brushed her hand on his shoulder to gain his attention.

"Hey, Ide!" she said. The man turned to her warmly.

"Hey!" he grinned ear to ear.

"Y'know where my father is?" Bulma cheeped, "I don't see him anywhere in the lab."

The man stalled and finally answered, "Yeah, yeah. I think he said he went out to try to get some of the officers downstairs in the bunker to drive out and get some supplies."

"Really?" Bulma lit up, "Wow! That'd be great!"

She looked to Dr. Gero, "My father's a genius!"

Dr. Gero was uncertain what the socially expected response was in such a situation. He shrugged and dove his bulbous fingers on his bottom lip to tap it meticulously, nervously.

"Anyways!" Bulma spoke to Dr. Gero while piloting the man with the drill toward his station with a point of her finger, "Daddy's responsible for the party making the Gravity Room itself. I'll be over the party making the spacecraft in which the GR will be installed—that party's way over there in the far left corner."

She reached up to her toes and pointed at a distant corner filled with industrious scientists, engineers, and mechanics, "And I _was _going to lead the group making the combat machines for guarding the alien. But! You're here now."

Dr. Gero blinked. He did not understand _homo sapien _social behavior and the subtleties involved.

"Yes," he nodded hesitantly, "I am here now."

"You've worked as an engineer for defense corporations before, right?" Bulma asked, "That's what the article said."

"Yes…"

"Then you'd be the best man to lead the engineering party for the combat machines!"

Dr. Gero cringed. The thought of having to lead other people made the familiar burn of bile stir in the back of his throat. _Leading _required _contact _and _communication_.

"No, no, that won't be nece—" Wait. What was he saying? This was the perfect opportunity.

He stuck his hand out for one last handshake with the woman standing across from him, "I'd be honored."

"That settles it, then," Bulma sighed with relief, "We've got ourselves a trio of scientists to lead the most advanced technological project on the face of the planet! At this rate, we'll be sure to finish in time—I hope."

"The planet is in our hands," Dr. Gero said, "in _my _hands. I assure you. It'll be safe there."

**A/N: **_Thank you for reading! Please share your input!_


	17. Chapter Sixteen: To Tame a Boy

Chapter Sixteen: To Tame a Boy

Gohan zipped through the air. The ground beneath had once been a green landscape draped loosely beneath him. Slowly, though, it had transformed into an orange desert populated by rock formations and thorny bushes. The boy had flown far from all signs of civilization and Vegeta's unmoved silence gave Gohan the impression that the plan had worked. for a little while, if only a very little while, Gohan had staled Vegeta's madness. Unfortunately, though, Gohan was only a boy at a tender age and did not bother to think what should do after he led Vegeta deep into the wilderness. It was not as if the little child could take on a Prince, let alone an Eternal one.

So when Gohan felt Vegeta's ki float down toward the ground, he was not entirely certain what to do. If Vegeta simply refused to go any further very little could be done.

Gohan twirled around and, floating high above Vegeta, looked down at the Prince. The Saiyajin had his arms crossed; that was never a good sign.

"What are you doing?" Gohan shouted, "We only have little farther to go till we get to Bulma's land!"

"Oh?" Vegeta twitched a brow. He did not move an inch. Gohan gulped down his nerves.

"I don't get it," the boy shouted again, "I thought you wanted to go to Bulma's land so you could find the Nameks and—"

Gohan thought he might have had an itch in his eye; he thought that perhaps he blinked convulsively. For Vegeta suddenly disappeared into darkness. A split second later, the boy felt something like a horse-powered fist plunge into his face. His body was thrown into the air from the force of the punch and only a moment later, again Vegeta appeared out of nowhere to do deliver Gohan a hard smack in the jaw.

Gohan fell and fell until he landed in the earth, dust billowing around him.

"Now look here, boy," Vegeta growled as he dropped lightly in front of Gohan's still body. The prince loomed over the helpless child, and as the sun cast long, dark shadows, Vegeta had become in Ghoan's eyes the very image of death.

"Do not take me for some gullible Earthling worm," Vegeta squeezed his arms closer to himself and tapped his finders on his forearm, "I know that the Nameks were in that city."

"Hehe," Gohan chuckled, "If you knew then why did you follow me?"

"I need to think."

"About what?" As Gohan said this blood trickled down his chin. He coughed and red splattered out.

"I needed to think about what I should do with you. At first, I thought I might kill you. It would be a shame, you know, to kill a fellow Saiyajin, but I've done it before and will happily do it again."

Gohan saw a flash: the horrifying sight of Vegeta tossing his own trusted comrade Nappa into the air. The boy knew this was no joke.

"But you don't want me dead?" Gohan asked, confusion oozing from his voice. If Vegeta had wanted Gohan dead, the Prince would have already killed the brat.

"No," Vegeta immediately replied, and then after a short pause a nostalgic gloss stretched over his eyes. The Prince peered at Gohan, and the boy could only feel naked and watched beneath those two cutting black eyes.

"Do you know what it's like to be royalty?" Vegeta asked suddenly. He stepped forward, to the boy's side lying prostrate on the ground. Kneeling down, the Prince leaned closer to Gohan.

"You are a god when you are royalty," Vegeta whispered, "You have everything because you are everything." His voice was dull and untouched by opinion; it was as if he were listing scientific measurements and facts. Yet his eyes glimmered with a strange, rueful light.

Then his demeanor morphed in a snap. His stolid face looked amused; his voice seemed almost playful.

"I used to have slaves, you know?" he reached out a hand and slowly twined each finger about Gohan's neck, I killed my last one, and really it's a shame. It is always useful to have a servant to do things for you."

Gohan cringed at the cold touch of Vegeta's fingers.

"I won't serve you..." Gohan kissed. Vegeta squeezed his hand ever so slightly, and Gohan went red, then white.

"Yes, you will," Vegeta nodded, "you know you will. Your father is dead. Your friends are dead. The Nameks will soon be nothing more than my slaves, and this Bulma of whom you speak—if such a man even exists—this Bulma will be dead. I don't have time for games any more. This little world of yours is mine now, and if you resist me, I will destroy every last one of you Earthlings. Do you understand?"

As Vegeta spoke he never ceased nodding slowly and confidently and soon Gohan found himself nodding docilely, too.

"So you will be my servant, won't you?" Vegeta asked.

Gohan nodded.

"And you will do as I ask, won't you?"

Gohan nodded.

"Now," Vegeta stood up. Gohan hanging from the Prince's grip, "I will ask you to do something for me now, and you will do it, won't you?"

Gohan nodded.

"Because if you don't, I will find your mother, and I will murder her, but I'll do more than just murder her, won't I?"

Gohan's eyes moistened; veins bulged and glowed red as tears collected.

"I will break her. I will make her endure such nauseating pain that she will crawl to me on her knees and grovel like a dog. She will beg for death, and I will not give it."

Tears openly teemed down Gohan's cheeks, and Vegeta released the boy so that Gohan fell on his feet in front of the Prince.

"I will break her again and again and again until she has lost even her will to beg for death. And then, and only then will I free her from her misery. But you don't understand what I mean, do you?"

Gohan sniffed.

"Do you? Of course, you don't. You're just a boy after all—an infant, really. But you can tell, can't you? From the look in my eyes, you know," Vegeta kneeled before Gohan so that their eyes were level and locked hard together, "I am dead serious."

Gohan focused on the black twinkle in Vegeta's eyes. It was something of a joyous wickedness in the Prince's eyes, and it frightened the boy.

Vegeta sensed the fright. Like a wolf, he tasted it in the air and reveled in it. He wanted to roll in the dirt and slip a gnawing, gripping belly laugh. The fear, the squirming, the tears—all of it delighted him.

Only one thing would have made all of it that much sweeter.

He felt a yearning to shout, "What I wouldn't giver for Freeza to be here! What I wouldn't give for Freeza to be in this stupid little brat's place! Let's watch you squirm, Freeza! Let's watch you writhe like the worm you are in the dirt beneath my feet. Let's watch grovel before me and serve me day and night. Let's watch you, and let's laugh like you laughed at me!"

But he did not shout that. He did not even think it or feel it. The words caught in a crevasse hidden beneath the shadow of a thought and like an open wound they festered there, silent but deadly, mutating into a larger, hungrier beast each second they went unspoken.

"Now!" Vegeta bound up on his feet once more, "Don't think it'll only be your mother! Don't think you'll get off that easy! I will find your friends. I will find your relatives, your neighbors, and I will torture and kill—"

"No! No! No!" Gohan screamed. He could no longer stand it. Pushing himself off the ground with his foot, Gohan rocketed forward headlong.

With a wave of energy, he shot toward Vegeta. The Prince crouched a bit to brace himself. When the boy arrived, the Saiyajin grappled Gohan by the hair and whipped the boy around to try to wrestle him into a headlock. Gohan floundered in rage, feeling hair tear from its roots.

"I hate you!" He bellowed, ripping his throat from the vehemence of his cry, "I hate you!"

Gohan's slipped out of Vegeta's grip. The boy once again charged toward the Prince—but in vain.

From behind Vegeta locked his arms around Gohan's and used a knee in the back to shove Gohan in the dirt. The boy strained and struggled. The rage erupting so wildly from so small a child—it was a beauty witnessed only by Saiyajin.

"Ha ha!" Vegeta rumbled as he shoved Gohan more firmly into the dirt, "I see your clown father in you, that's for sure! You really are a Saiyajin! You might even be called worthy to be my slave!"

"I'm no Saiyajin! I'm no slave! I hate you!"

"Boy," Vegeta whispered into Gohan's ear, "You can hate me all you want, so long as you fear me more. You fear me more, don't you?"

"I hate you!" Gohan squirmed.

"Yes! Hate! Despise! Destroy! Kill! Kill! Like a Saiyajin should!" Vegeta sneered.

"No!"

"You can't help it boy! It's in your blood!"

"Let me go!"

"You are my slave, boy!" Vegeta laughed, "Accept it!"

"No! My dad will beat you!"

"Daddy is dead," Vegeta snapped.

"Then Kururin, Piccolo..."

"They're all dead, boy," Vegeta loosened his grip on Gohan. The boy was so overcome with grief, he did not even notice. He collapsed on the ground and curled into himself like a fetus, sobbing and moaning with despair.

Vegeta let go of the boy completely now and stood up while crossing his arms.

"You're all alone, boy," Vegeta snickered, "all alone."

For a while, Gohan did nothiong but weep, and Vegeta let him. Yet the Prince's patience eventually dried out, and Vegeta decided to make his last move to seize the boy's shattered mind.

He walked up to Gohan, bent over, and offered a hand.

"Take my hand, and I will spare you," Vegeta said.

Gohan wiped his tears and galnced up at the dark figure stooping over him like a vulture.

"I wish I were dead," Gohan muttered. Vegeta knelt on one knee and curled his hand into the shape of a gun. He let a pulse flicker at the tip of his forefinger as he pointed it in the center of Gohan's forehead.

Gohan's eyes grew large, intently following the movement of Vegeta's hand.

"You're gonna kill us all anyway, right?" Gohan sniffled with a grim smile spreading across his face.

"In time," said Vegeta.

Gohan laughed quietly to himself. He felt the warmth emitting from Vegeta's finger burning into his skin and it tickled.

"Give me the order, boy," Vegeta ignored the child's hysterics and made the dare in a calm and nearly kindly voice, "and I'll do it. You won't feel a thing."

Gohan closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He wanted his daddy; he knew Piccolo trained him to be strong, but he did not care. He wanted his daddy.

"But don't think you'll go to heaven," Vegeta taunted, burning his finger deeper into Gohan's forehead, "That's a vain superstition, especially for someone like you, someone who killed his one friend and master—the green man. Maybe your father got lucky and wiggled his way out of punishment, but us? We live on blood.

"You heard yourself: 'You hate me! You wish you were dead!' You thrive on death and violence, boy! What've you been doing non-stop since your little uncle went to pay you a visit? Fighting! Fighting! Killing! Killing!

"You're a Saiyajin! You're life is death, and your death is your undoing. When you die you will burn for what seems like an eternity, and when the gods finally decide to vomit you back into the universe, you'll be little more than a dung beetle. Is that what you want? To be a dung beetle? I guess you aren't much bigger than one with the way you've been bawling!"

"Stop it!" Gohan leaped onto his feet and turned his back to Vegeta. The boy covered his ears with his palms and began battering his ears repeatedly.

"Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!" He screamed maniacally.

Vegeta forced Gohan's hands off his ears an spoke softly, "Face it, boy. You have no other option but to do what I tell you."

"I can kill you..." Gohan spat out loud.

"When you're older, let's see, but now?" Vegeta raised a brow, "Ha. Besides, you know I'll just come back again. If you don't obey me, I'll kill your friends and your family. I'll kill everyone and everything. I have all of eternity before me. I don't have to fear punishment, and I enjoy watching people die."

That was not entirely true. He had been trained not to enjoy the death of ants or of enemies. Indeed, he had been trained not to enjoy anything at all; pleasures were for the peasants, and he was royalty. Yet the moment called for such words.

It worked. Gohan loosened his muscles. Vegeta let the boy turn to face him.

"And if I do what you say? You won't kill everyone? At least for a little while?" Gohan asked. His voice was high-pitched, like the coo of a dove.

Vegeta smirked, "Does a child get suddenly stronger, faster, better for killing ants? No. And neither do I. Killing your humans contributes nothing to me if they aren't first presenting some obstacle to my goal. If anything, their industry will probably help me?"

"Industry?" Gohan echoed. He was uncertain what the word meant, though he had heard it before.

Vegeta snorted, "Now, I know they'll try to resist me, but with you as a servant, I'm sure they'll be easy to tame. Far easier to tame than you, boy."

Gohan looked down at his feet submissively.

"What will I have to do?" Gohan said.

Vegeta raise his brow higher.

"For you?" Gohan said. There was little he could do to resist his circumstances.

"Everyone will live who does not inhibit me. Know that first. As long as you obey me, they won't die," Vegeta assured the boy.

Gohan nodded faintly, "Okay..."

"I want you to tell me what's really going on, boy," Vegeta glowered.

Gohan swallowed down his tears.

"The Nameks are in the city. I don't know what's going on really. I've been away. But Bulma, she—"

"She?" Vegeta interjected.

"Yes, Bulma is a woman. She and her dad own a lot of buildings and things like that. They make robots and stuff. They made my d—my dad a spaceship. She's the one that trapped you in that mini-gravity room."

Then Bulma was the blue-haired one, the one Vegeta must kill.

"Go on," Vegeta said.

"I think, they're—" Gohan stammered; Bulma had kept him in the dark, "making something."

"Go on."

"I don't know," Gohan shrugged, "I don't know anything. I was away. The Nameks are in Bulma's buildings. Muri and Dende are trying to make more Dragon Balls. The buildings they're in have guns and robots guarding it."

"And?"

"I don't know," Gohan whispered.

Vegeta frowned impatiently.

"What do you want me to say?" Gohan yelled, tears budding out of the corners of his eyes.

"Tell me," Vegeta stroked his chin, "who's in charge here?"

Gohan blinked blankly, "Here?"

"Here," Vegeta stated blandly, "on Earth."

Sweat wriggled down Bulma's forehead as heat poured down from the lamp. In front of her was a desk with a clipboard on it. Papers laden with ink shuffled beneath Bulma's hands as she shifted papers here and there.

Progress was good, as good as it could get under the circumstances. Her father was working on the gravity rooms; she was working on the spaceship; and Dr. Gero (who finally found the time to fill out his paperwork) was working on the combatant robotics.

"You've always been like this, ever since you were a little girl," a warm old voice spoke gently behind her. So soothing was the voice that Bulma did not jump, though she was surprised. She looked over her shoulder with an intense expression on her face. She had been concentrating for what felt like hours now.

"Daddy," Bulma said with a slight frown, "you should go back to work. We need to get everything done as fast as possible."

A lurid red bled through the windows and possessed Bulma's surroundings with a heated sorrow, akin to crying tears of blood.

Dr. Briefs smiled with his eyes and with a wiggle of his mustached said, "Even when you were little you would get so absorbed in your work whenever bad things ha—"

"Dad, I don't want to her this now! Get back to work!" Bulma snapped. The room went silent around her, and then gradually the quiet hum of industry returned like the gradual speed of a chugging locomotive.

Bulma sighed and slammed her pen on her clipboard. With both hands, she pushed herself away from her desk and off her chair. She stood up; her once white lab coat was smudged with grease, and her feet were visibly red from walking and standing endlessly ever since the project began earlier that day.

Bulma rested her hands on her hips. She let her eyes droop penitently.

"I'm sorry, Daddy!" she cried, and then without notice her whole front dissolved into tears. She threw herself into her father's already open arms and cried a muffled cry on his shoulder.

"It's alright..." Dr. Briefs said peacefully to his daughter as he stroked her blue hair.

"No!" Bulma pulled away from her father so she could look in his eyes, "No, it's not! I've been yelling all day! I yelled at Piccolo; I yelled at him and now he's dead! Everyone's dead, Daddy..."

Dr. Briefs smiled sadly and wiped away his daughter's tears.

"Except Gohan," Bulma continued, "and with the way I've been, he probably hates me now."

Bulma's eyes roved sporadically around her in angst, "That poor baby boy! His dad is dead. His friends are dead. And I had to go and yell at him. I was awful. Oh Kami! I'm an awful person!"

Bulma dove her face back into her father's comforting shoulder once more.

"Now, now, we al have our good days and our bad days," Dr. Briefs began.

"But this day is awful! Everything's just awful!" Bulma exclaimed, "We saved him! We helped him! We defeated Freeza with him! And then he goes and kills people—he kills _our _people, Daddy! Our co-workers! Danny! Freda! They were your friends, right?"

Dr. Briefs nodded, "But we must not hate those who do us wrong."

"But I do hate him, Dad!" Bulma shouted and pushed herself away from her father, "I want to kill him like he killed Piccolo!"

"Now, Bulma—"

"And Mr. Morrow, the civil engineer! He had two kids. And Robby—Robby! Remember him?"

Dr. Briefs hunched over his shoulders and nodded, "We are better than this."

"And Izawa and Carmen and—by Kami!" Bulma choked down a sob, "He's killed so many! We should've left him in space to rot! That bastard!"

In a flurry, Bulma swirled around and slammed herself back onto her desk. Immediately, she began furiously scribbling. She was back to work.

"You see?" Dr. Briefs smiled, "It's in your nature to work when things get rough! That's good! It means you can be trusted in disasters."

Bulma let her eyelashes flutter a little, like she always did when Daddy paid her a compliment.

"Now," Dr. Briefs slipped behind Bulma and gave her shoulders a gently squeeze, "Let me tell you one more thing before I leave, and then I promise, I'll get back to work!"

Bulma stopped scribbling as loudly and perked an ear up.

"There was once an old monk on pilgrimage shuffling down a stony path. For every step he took, he bowed on his knees and then stretched out prostrate on the ground, with his prayer beads in his hand. Now as he came to a bend in the path, a youth approached him. The monk smiled and blessed the youth, but the youth spat at him and cursed him. For every good the monk did, the youth did tenfold bad. So the monk tried to move on, but the youth would not let him pass.

"The youth was a robber, and he beat the monk, stole the prayer beads and the monk's robe, and left the old man naked there in the mud. So the old monk despaired and raged in his sorrow. He cursed the youth and wished the youth dead. Not long after, night came and the old monk died of exposure. His Buddha Amitabha later came and scooped him up into the warmth of the Pure Land, and there was the old monk reborn. And as the monk lay beside Amitabha, the old monk looked to his master.

'At last!' He said, 'I have lived a life without blame so that I could return to you, my lord!'

'Ah!' said Amitabha, 'Indeed you lived a life blameless except for one wrong.'

'And what wrong is that lord?' asked the monk.

'You cursed and wished your slayer dead!' Amitabha said.

'But surely, lord, there is no blame in that!' cried the monk, 'The youth spat on me, robbed me, killed me!'

'Verily, he did such things,' Amitabha agreed, 'and the horror of his sins weighed so heavily upon him that he repented and made a new way for himself. He was a Prince, the son of a great King and would have saved many lives and fed many mouths had he been allowed to live his new life. But you, you did curse him and wish him dead! And the spirits heard you and returned on him what he had done to you, so that now he is dead. Many lives now shall not be spared and many mouths now shall not be fed because you would not forgive.'"

Bulma had been resting her cheek in her palm and was listening quietly to her father's story, just like she had done at bedtime when she was a girl. Bulma smiled with sorrow still harrowing her face. She leaned offer her chair to peck her father on the cheek.

"It's a sweet thought, Daddy," she said, "but stories are stories. People who kill other people like Vegeta does—they just aren't capable of anything but killing. He killed so many people, and he doesn't even care. The only way is to get rid of him, to send him away in the _Pronto_."

Dr. Briefs nodded understandingly and went his separate way.

Bulma was left alone with her work. There was so much to do and yet there was such progress over so short a time. The reason was, of course, because so many plans had already been prepared. It was hard for the governments throughout the world to stick their heads in the sand while Goku ran amok as a boy. They tracked the strange occurrences and pinpointed that boy as the cause. They also pinpointed the teenage girl Bulma in the process.

It was not as though she had a choice—especially since they could use so many vulnerable spots in Capsule Corp's monopolistic business practices as leverage. Bulma would occasionally be summoned by the government to report on Goku. They did not ask or much; she just talked about what she did on a day-to-day basis with her friend Goku. She was so young at the time, she did not entirely grasp what they were about, but later on, when she secured her position as a world famous scientist, she was made privy to just what the government was planning.

They had determined early on that the boy Goku could be nothing less than a dangerous mutation and nothing more than a hostile alien. They had a team design scores of space shuttles loaded with combatant robotics in an attempt to ship Goku off into space. Bulma was older, though, at that time. She only had to flip her phone open and make a dare:

"Which of us do you think pays our lawyers better? The pauper bureaucrats or the multibillion-dollar corporation? Hmm..." She tapped her chin teasingly, "Hard question!"

It did not matter much by that time, however. The governments realized how absurd it was to think that a child was an alien, much less an alien responsible for various, disjointed phenomena occurring throughout the world. They determined Goku was harmless; they did not bother Bulma again, except on rare occasions with long deserts in between—like now.

Having a hunch that Bulma would know something, they called her immediately after Vegeta started to attack Orange Star City and demanded information. Not long after, the _Pronto Project _was up and running. To be honest, it was merely a continuation of the project the government had started for Goku all those years ago.

As Bulma scribbled, she felt somewhat relieved, as though thousands of loads were being lifted right off her shoulders the more and more she worked. She did love to work. It was an escape from all the horrible things that had happened. She did not have to worry about anything except scientific calculations. It was better that way. For the first time all day, Bulma almost felt at peace.

_Beep! Beep! Beep!_

An alarm suddenly flashed red. Then it flashed again. A deafening siren pealed in the air; it roared and roared and blistered the eardrums.

Bulma made her way into the lab. Everyone was buzzing back and forth in panic.

"What is going on here?" She bellowed over the sirens, "What's happening?"

"Someone is breaking into the complex! Into the buildings!" someone shrieked, "Into the labs!"

"Breaking in? What do you mean breaking in?" Bulma was flustered, "It's not as if we bar all the windows. All you have to do is walk through the open doors and down a hallway to get here."

"No!" Dr. Briefs hollered from a far corner, "Someone is shooting at people!"

"What?"

"Come over here! We've got cameras!" Dr. Briefs waved his daughter over, and Bulma came dashing. For once, she was glad her architect got lazy and slapped the camera room right next to the lab—regardless of how many times she had asked to put it somewhere "more secure."

There was a wall of cameras. The hallways. The lobby. The stairs. The lab itself. Every major room and access route that was not used as the personal space of the Briefs—it was all there on screen.

"You see?" Dr. Briefs pointed out a familiar face marching through the lobby and into a hallway.

"Vegeta..." Bulma wonder aloud, "How did he—wait! Who's that?" She tapped a finger on the screen atop a stunted little character waddling in an obedient daze at Vegeta's side.

"Gohan, what're you doing?" Bulma felt tears swirl in her eyes as Gohan reluctantly shoved a man in a lab coat aside at the Prince's command.

"Where do you think they're headed? Not for us—they're going the opposite direction," the camera operator speculated.

"That's right," Dr. Briefs affirmed, "Nothing that way but the stairs to our temporary rooms when we stay the night—and it opens up to the causeway leading to our house."

"And the stairs to the underground bunker," the camera operator revealed.

"Where all the people are!" Bulma exclaimed. She darted out of the camera room.

"Bulma!" her father shouted after her, "Wait for some help!" But what could help her stop something unstoppable? She did not know what she would do but she was determined no one else was going to die because of that ape. She did not know how should would enforce such a mandate, but she was resolved on getting it done.

Nimbly, she raced across the lab, out into the hall, through the lobby. She could hear distant screams and raucous clanging below her feet. They must have already been in the bunker—doing what, she didn't dare to imagine.

**A/N: **_Thank you for reading! Please share your input!_


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